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Title: All in the Day's Work: An Autobiography

Author: Ida M. Tarbell

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Language: English

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THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK · BOSTON · CHICAGO
DALLAS · ATLANTA · SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON · BOMBAY · CALCUTTA
MADRAS · MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OF CANADA, LIMITED
TORONTO

Photograph by
Alfred Cheney
Johnston

At 70

ALL IN THE DAY’S
WORK
An Autobiography

BY IDA M. TARBELL

NEW YORK

The Macmillan Company

1939

Copyright, 1939, by
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
All rights reserved—no part of this book may be reproduced in any
form without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a
reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a
review written for inclusion in magazine or newspaper.
First Printing.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
AMERICAN BOOK—STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK

To

Sarah A. Tarbell
My Sister and My Loyal Friend

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
1. MY START IN LIFE 1

2. I DECIDE TO BE A BIOLOGIST 19

3. A COEDUCATIONAL COLLEGE OF THE EIGHTIES 37

4. A START AND A RETREAT 49

5. A FRESH START—A SECOND RETREAT 64

6. I FALL IN LOVE 89

7. A FIRST BOOK—ON NOTHING CERTAIN A YEAR 124

8. THE NAPOLEON MOVEMENT OF THE NINETIES 147

9. GOOD-BYE TO FRANCE 161

10. REDISCOVERING MY COUNTRY 179

11. A CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY SEEKS MY ACQUAINTANCE 202

12. MUCKRAKER OR HISTORIAN? 231

13. OFF WITH THE OLD—ON WITH THE NEW 254

14. THE GOLDEN RULE IN INDUSTRY 280

15. A NEW PROFESSION 301

16. WOMEN AND WAR 319

17. AFTER THE ARMISTICE 336

18. GAMBLING WITH SECURITY 359

19. LOOKING OVER THE COUNTRY 385

20. NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN 398

INDEX 409

ILLUSTRATIONS

AT SEVENTY Frontispiece

PAGE
EARLIEST PORTRAIT 2

OFFICE STAFF OF THE CHAUTAUQUAN, 1888 76

AT McCLURE’S, 1898 156

AT THE AMERICAN, 1907 258

IN A CONNECTICUT GARDEN, 1914 266

AT RED CROSS HEADQUARTERS, PARIS, 1919 338

POSING AS A GARDENER, 1925 360

ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK

1
MY START IN LIFE

If it had not been for the Panic of 1857 and the long depression which
followed it I should have been born in Taylor County, Iowa. That was what
my father and mother had planned. In fact, however, I was born in a log
house in Erie County, Pennsylvania, on November 5, 1857. It was the home
of my pioneering maternal grandfather Walter Raleigh McCullough. No
home in which I have ever lived has left me with pleasanter memories of
itself. It was a Cape Cod house, a story and a half high, built of matched
hewn logs, its floors of narrow fitted oak planks, its walls ceiled, its
“upstairs” finished, a big fireplace in its living room. There were spreading
frame outbuildings to accommodate the multiple activities of a farm which
was in my time a going concern. I remember best the big cool milk room
with its dozens of filled pans on the racks, its huge wooden bowl heaped
with yellow butter on its way to the firkin, its baskets piled with eggs, its
plump dressed poultry ready for market.
Like all young married people of pioneer ancestry and experience having
their way to make, my parents wanted land. Land of their own, combined
with what my father could earn at his profession as a teacher and his trade
as a joiner, meant future security. It was the proved way of the early
American.
After much looking about in northwestern Pennsylvania where the
families of both were settled, they had decided that the West offered greater
opportunity and so in the spring of 1857, a year after his marriage, my
father, Franklin Sumner Tarbell by name, started out to find a farm. He had
but little money in his pocket, and the last one hundred fifty miles of his
search were made on foot. How enthusiastic he was over the claim he at last
secured! His letters tell of the splendid dome of sky which covered it, of the

far view over the prairie, of marvelous flowers and birds, of the daily
passing along the horizon of a stream of covered wagons, settlers bound for
California, Pikes Peak, Kansas, Nebraska; and some of them, he found,
were earlier Iowa settlers, leaving the very state which for the moment
seemed to him the gate to Paradise.
He set himself gaily at breaking land, building the house for mother,
working in a sawmill to pay for the lumber. He did it alone, even to the
making of window frames and doors. I know how he did it—whistling from
morning till night, mischief and tenderness chasing each other across his
blue eyes as he thought of my mother’s coming, their future together.
The plan they had made provided for her going west with their household
goods in August. The money was arranged for, so they thought; but before it
was taken from the bank the panic came, and every county bank in
Pennsylvania was closed. There was no money anywhere, nothing for my
mother to do but stay where she was while my father struggled to earn by
teaching and carpenter work the money which would bring us on. But the
panic reached Iowa, dried up its money supply. People were living by
barter, my father reported. What a heartbreaking waiting it was for them,
coming as it did after an engagement of six years every week of which they
had both found long!
The fall and winter of 1857, the spring and summer of 1858 passed. Still
there was no money to be had, and then in the fall of 1858 father started out
to teach his way to us. Before he found a school he had walked one hundred
and eighty miles—walked until his shoes and clothes were worn and
tattered. It was “shabby and broke,” as he had written it would be, that he
finally in the spring of 1859, when I was a year and a half old, made his
way back to my mother still living in the log house in Erie County.
According to the family annals I deeply resented the intimacy between
the strange man and my mother, so far my exclusive possession. Flinging
my arms about my mother, so the story went, I cried, “Go away, bad man.”

Esther Ann McCullough
Tarbell and Ida Minerva
Tarbell, November 5, 1858

The problem for my father now was to earn money to take us back to
Iowa, for my mother to continue her patient waiting. For a dozen years
before her marriage she had taught in district schools in Erie County, as
well as in a private school of an aunt in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was
a good teacher, but she was married! She must stay with her family then
until her husband had a home ready for her; so ruled my grandmother,
chock-full as she was of the best and severest New England rules for
training girls to be ladies. You might live in a log house. You were reminded
loftily that many of the “best families” had done that while “settling the
country,” but you must “never forget who you are!” “Remember that your
father is a McCullough of an ancient and honored Scotch clan, his mother a
Raleigh of Sir Walter’s family, that I am a Seabury, my great-uncle the first
Episcopal Bishop in the United States, my mother a Welles, her father on
Washington’s staff.” It was a litany her four daughters all had to learn!
Exciting employment waited my father. For six or seven years before his
marriage, when he was earning his way through the Academy of
Jamestown, New York, he spent his summers running a fleet of three or
more flatboats of merchandise to be delivered at trading points on the
Allegheny and the Ohio River—always as far south as Louisville,
sometimes even up the Mississippi. “Captain Tarbell,” his small and jolly
crew called him. The River was the chief highway of a great country. To its
waters came the pioneer and trader, the teacher, the preacher, the scientist,
the prophet, as well as every species of gambler, charlatan, speculator,
swindler, cutthroat. My father’s stories of what he saw were among the joys

of my childhood: a great fleet of steamboats burning at Pittsburgh, a
hanging, river churches and preachers and show boats, children who never
knew other homes than a boat, towns, cities, and what he loved best of all—
nights floating quietly down the great Ohio, the moon above. Not strange
that after those cruel months of working his way back to us he should have
seized this opportunity again to take charge of his Jamestown friend’s river
enterprise.
The trip went well, and at the end of August, 1859, he turned back,
money in his pocket to take us to Iowa. But as he journeyed eastward he
was met everywhere by excitement. A man had drilled a well near a lumber
settlement in northwestern Pennsylvania—Titusville it was called—drilled
for oil and found it, quantities of it. My father, like most men who traveled
up and down the Allegheny and Ohio in those days, was familiar with crude
petroleum. He had used it to grease creaking machinery and, too, as a
medicine, a general cure-all, Seneca oil; used it for the colds, the fever and
ague, the weak lungs which had afflicted him from boyhood. He knew, too,
that there were those who believed that if rock oil, as it was called, could be
found in sufficient quantities it would make a better light than the coal and
whale oils then in common use. The well near Titusville producing twenty-
five to one hundred barrels a day—nobody knew how much—proved that if
other reservoirs or veins could be opened by such drilling there would be oil
to light the world.
Rumors were exciting and grew in the telling. The nearer he came to Erie
County, the bigger the well. He met men on foot and horseback making
their way in. Something to look into before he started back to Iowa. He
looked into it, not merely at Titusville with its first well, but down the
stream on which the first well stood and where other wells were already
drilling. Oil Creek, it was called. What if they continued to get oil? my
father asked himself. Where would they put it? They would need tanks,
tanks in numbers. He believed he could build one that would hold five
hundred or more barrels. He said as much to the owner of a well drilling
down the creek near the mouth of a tributary called Cherry Run. “Show me
a model that won’t leak, and I’ll give you an order.” He lost no time in
making his model and got his order.
Here was a chance for a business if oil continued to be found, a business
with more money in it than he had ever dreamed of making. Moreover, he

knew all the elements of that business, had had experience in handling
them. Tank building called for his trade, that of the joiner. Iowa could wait.
By the summer of 1860 he had his shop going at the mouth of Cherry
Run near the well for which he had received his first order. The shop
running, he built what was to be my mother’s first home of her own, the one
for which with infinite confidence and infinite pain she had been waiting
since her marriage four years and a half before.
It was in October of 1860 that my father drove his little family over the
Allegheny foothills some forty miles. There were two of us children now,
for in July of 1860 my brother William Walter Tarbell, named from his two
grandfathers, had been born. Close beside his shop father had built a shanty.
It had a living room with an alcove, a family bedroom with trundle beds for
us children, and a kitchen. A covered passage led into the shop, which was
soon to be the joy of my life for here were great piles of long odorous curly
pine shavings into which to roll, to take naps, to trim my gown, and in
which to search day in and day out for the longest, the curliest.
But these shavings and my delight in them were a later discovery. My
first reaction to my new surroundings was one of acute dislike. It aroused
me to a revolt which is the first thing I am sure I remember about my life—
the birth in me of conscious experience. This revolt did not come from
natural depravity; on the contrary it was a natural and righteous protest
against having the life and home I had known, and which I loved, taken
away without explanation and a new scene, a new set of rules which I did
not like, suddenly imposed.
My life in the log house had been full of joyous interests. There were
turkeys and ducks and chickens, lambs and colts and calves, kittens and
puppies—never could I be without playmates. There were trees and woods
and flowers in summer—a great fireplace with popcorn and maple candy in
winter, and I an only grandchild the center of it all. But what had I come to?
As mother realized, a place of perils, a creek rushing wildly at the side of
the house, great oil pits sunken in the earth not far away, a derrick inviting
to adventurous climbing at the door. No wonder that warnings and
scoldings and occasional switchings dogged my steps. Moreover, I was no
longer the center of the circle: a baby filled her arms—“my” arms! A man
still strange gave me orders and claimed her—“my” mother.

It was not to be endured, and so one November day just after my third
birthday I announced I was going to leave. “Going back to Grandma.”
“Very well,” my mother said. I knew the way the men went when they
walked away from the shop, and I followed it, but not far. Across the valley
in which we lived ran an embankment. To my young eyes it was as high as
a mountain, and the nearer I came the higher it looked, the higher and
blacker. And then suddenly as I came to its foot I realized that I had never
been on the other side, that I did not know the way to Grandma’s. I knew I
was beaten, and sat down to think it over. Never in all these years since
have I faced defeat, known that I must retreat, that I have not been again
that little figure with the black mountain in front of it, a little figure looking
longingly at a shanty dim in the growing night but showing a light in the
window.
Finally I turned slowly back to the house and sat down on the steps. It
seemed a long time before the door opened and my mother in a surprised
voice said:
“Why, Ida! I thought you had gone to Grandma’s.”
“I don’t know the way,” I said humbly.
“Very well. Come in and get your supper.”
Respect for my mother, her wisdom in dealing with hard situations, was
born then. I was not to be punished; I was not to be laughed at; I was to be
accepted. Years later she told me of the unhappy hour she spent watching
me go off so sturdily, to come back so droopingly, watching with tears
running down her cheeks, but determined I must learn my lesson. It was a
bit of wisdom she never ceased to practice. My mother always let me carry
out my revolts, return when I would and no questions asked.
In the three years we spent in the shanty on the flats there was but one
other episode that had for me the same self-revealing quality as this revolt.
It was my first attempt to test by experiment. The brook which ran beside
the house was rapid, noisy, in times of high water dangerous for children.
Watching it, fascinated, I observed that some things floated on the surface,
others dropped to the bottom. It set me to wondering what would happen to
my little brother, then in dresses, if dropped in. I had to find out. There was
a footbridge near the house, and one day when I supposed I was unobserved
I led him onto it and dropped him in. His little skirts spread out and held
him up. Fortunately at that moment his screams brought a near-by

workman, and he was rescued. I suppose I was spanked; of that I remember
nothing, only the peace of satisfied curiosity in the certainty that my brother
belonged to the category of things which floated.
What I really remember of these early days concerns only my personal
discoveries, discoveries of the kind of person I was, of the nature of things
around me which stirred my curiosity. Whether a childish experience was
deep enough to etch itself on my memory or I only know of it from hearing
it told and retold, I always decide by this test: if I really remember it, the
happening is set in a scene—a scene with a background, exits, entrances,
and properties. I know I remember my revolt and defeat because I always
see it as an act on a stage, every detail, every line clear.
Of the pregnant, bizarre, and often tragic development going on about me
I remember nothing; yet the uncertainties and dangers of it were part of our
daily fare.
Whether there was oil in the ground in sufficient quantities to justify the
prodigious effort being made to find it, nobody could know. If not, the shop
and shanty were a dead loss—another long delay on the road to Iowa. All
that winter of 1860 and 1861 my father was asking himself that question;
but in 1861 it was answered when up and down Oil Creek a succession of
flowing wells came in, wells producing from three hundred to three
thousand barrels a day—“fountain wells,” “gushers,” “spouters,” they
called them from the great streams which rose straight into the air one to
two hundred feet, to fall in an oily green-black spray over the surrounding
landscape.
Deadly, dangerous, too, as the Oil Region learned to its sorrow by a
disaster almost at the doorsteps of our Cherry Run home. It was the evening
of April 17, 1861. The news of the Fall of Sumter had just reached the
settlement, remote as it was from rail and telegraph connections, and all the
men of the town had gathered after supper at one place or another to discuss
the situation. What did it mean? What would the President do? My father
was sitting on a cracker barrel in the one general store. As he and his friends
talked a man ran in to tell the company that a fresh vein of oil had been
struck in a well on the edge of the town. Its owner, Henry Rouse, had been
drilling it deeper; the oil was spouting over the derrick. Great news for the
community still uncertain as to the extent of its field. Great news for my
father. It meant tanks. Everybody jumped to run to the well when the earth

was rocked by a mighty explosion. A careless light had ignited the gas
which had spread from the flowing oil until it had enveloped everything in
the vicinity. Before my father reached the place nineteen men, among them
his friend the well—owner Henry Rouse, had been burned to death. How
many had escaped and in what condition, nobody knew.
Late that night as my father and mother grieved they heard outside their
door a stumbling something. Looking out, they saw before them a terrible
sight, a man burned and swollen beyond recognition and yet alive, alive
enough to give his name—one of their friends. My mother took him in—the
alcove became a hospital. For weeks she nursed him—the task of the
woman in a pioneer community, a task which she accepted as her part.
Thanks to her care, the man lived. The relics of that tragedy were long
about our household—comforts and bedquilts she had pieced and quilted
for Iowa stained with linseed oil, but too precious to be thrown away.
But all this is as something read in a book, something which has become
more poignant as the years have gone by and I am able to feel what those
long weeks of care over that broken man meant to my mother.
The business prospered, the shop grew. Little do I remember of all this,
or the increased comforts of life or moving into the new home on the
hillside above the town by this time known as Rouseville. But the change in
the outlook on the world about me, I do remember. We had lived on the
edge of an active oil farm and oil town. No industry of man in its early days
has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency, than the
production of petroleum. All about us rose derricks, squatted engine-houses
and tanks; the earth about them was streaked and damp with the dumpings
of the pumps, which brought up regularly the sand and clay and rock
through which the drill had made its way. If oil was found, if the well
flowed, every tree, every shrub, every bit of grass in the vicinity was coated
with black grease and left to die. Tar and oil stained everything. If the well
was dry a rickety derrick, piles of debris, oily holes were left, for nobody
ever cleaned up in those days.
But we left the center of this disorder, went to the hillside, looked down
on it; and as for me I no longer saw it, for opposite us was a hillside so
steep it had never been drilled. It was clothed with the always changing
beauty of trees and shrubs, the white shadflowers and the red maples, the
long garlands of laurel and azalea in the spring, the green of every shade

through the summer, the crimson and gold, russets and tans of the fall, the
frost- and snow-draped trees of the winter. I did not see the derricks for the
trees. The hillside above our house and the paths which led around it
became a playground in which I reveled. I was not the only one about to
forget the ugliness of the Valley and remember through life the beauty of
those hillsides. Years later I was to know fairly well one of the great figures
in the development of oil, Henry H. Rogers, then the active head of the
Standard Oil Company. We discovered in talking over the early days of the
industry that at the very moment I was beginning to run the hills above
Rouseville he was running a small refinery on the Creek and living on a
hillside just below ours, separated only by a narrow ravine along each side
of which ran a path. “Up that path,” Mr. Rogers told me, “I used to carry
our washing every Monday morning, go for it every Saturday night.
Probably I’ve seen you hunting flowers on your side of the ravine. How
beautiful it was! I was never happier.” That reminiscence of Henry H.
Rogers is only one of several reasons I have for heartily liking as fine a
pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street.
Soon after we went to the home on the hill the oil country, at that
moment suffering a depression, was stirred by the news that a great well
had been struck ten miles from Rouseville at Pithole, an isolated territory to
which the veterans in the business had never given a thought. The news
caused a wild scramble. A motley procession of men with and without
money, with and without decency, seeking leases, jobs, opportunity for
adventure, excitement and swindling travelled on foot or horseback up the
Valley of Cherry Run in full view from our house.
Father was one of the first to take advantage of the Pithole discovery,
putting up his tank shops there and doing a smashing business during the
short life of the field. Its “bottom fell out” in 1869. He rode back and forth
from his shop on a little saddle horse—Flora, beautiful creature—usually
with considerable sums of money in his pocket. The country was full of
ruffians, and stories of robbery were common. When he was very late in
returning mother would walk the floor wringing her hands. I could never go
to bed those nights until he had returned, not because I felt her anxiety but
because of the excitement and mystery of it. I carried a dramatic picture of
him in mind, a kind of Paul Revere dashing along the lonely road, the rein
on Flora’s neck, his pistol in hand. But he always came home, always
brought the money he had collected, which he must keep in the tiny iron

safe in his office annexed to the house until he could carry it to Oil City
where he banked.
My life became rapidly more conscious now that I had left the flats
behind, experience deeper. Here was my first realization of tragedy. It was
the spring of 1865. Father was coming up the hill, mother and I were
watching for him. Usually he walked with a brisk step, head up, but now his
step was slow, his head dropped. Mother ran to meet him crying, “Frank,
Frank, what is it?” I did not hear the answer; but I shall always see my
mother turning at his words, burying her face in her apron, running into her
room sobbing as if her heart would break. And then the house was shut up,
and crape was put on all the doors, and I was told that Lincoln was dead.
From that time the name spelt tragedy and mystery. Why all this sorrow
over a man we had never seen, who did not belong to our world—my
world? Was there something beyond the circle of hills within which I lived
that concerned me? Why, and in what way, did this mysterious outside
concern me?
I was soon to learn that tragedy did not come always from a mysterious
beyond. What a chain of catastrophes it took to teach the men and women
who were developing the new industry the constant risk they ran in
handling either crude or refined oil. They came to our very door, when a
neighboring woman hurrying to build a fire in her cookstove poured oil on
the wood before she had made sure there were no live coals in the firebox.
An awful explosion occurred and she and two women who ran to her
assistance were burned to a crisp. I heard horrified whisperings about me.
The refusal to tell me what had happened aroused a terrible curiosity. I
gathered that the bodies were laid out in a house not far away and, when
nobody was looking, stole in to look at them. Broken sleep for me for
nights.
The mystery of death finally came into our household. There had been a
fourth child born in the house on the hill—“little Frankie,” we always called
him—blue-eyed like my father, the sunniest of us all. For weeks one season
he lay in the parlor fighting for life—scarlet fever—a disease more dreaded
by mothers in those days than even smallpox. Daily I stood helpless,
agonized, outside the door behind which little Frankie lay screaming and
fighting the doctor. I remember even today how long the white marks lasted

on the knuckles of my hands after the agony behind the closed door had
died down and my clenched fists relaxed.
Little Frankie died, became a pathetic and beloved tradition in the
household. My little sister, who had made a terrible and successful fight
against the disease, told me how she could not understand why father and
mother cried when they talked of Frankie.
“If they want to see him,” she thought, “why do they not put a ladder
from the top of the hill up to the sky into heaven and climb up? If Frankie is
there God would let them see him.”
I have said that my first recollection of Lincoln was the impression made
by the tragedy of his death. That this was so was not for the lack of material
on him in our household. My father was an ardent Republican. Back in ’56
he had written from his river trip, “Hurrah for Frémont and Dayton.” As
soon as he had had more money than the actual needs of the family
required, he had subscribed to Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, the New
York Tribune, began to buy books. Of all of these I remember only the
Weekly and Monthly. My brother and I used to lie by the hour flat on our
stomachs, heels in the air, turning over the exciting pages of the War
numbers; but none of it went behind my eyes—none concerned me. Only
now when I go back to the files of those old papers there is a whispering of
something once familiar.
Of the Monthly I have more distinct recollections. It was in these that I
first began to read freely. Many a private picnic did I have with the Monthly
under the thorn bushes on the hillside above Oil Creek, a lunch basket at my
side. There are still in the family storeroom copies of Harper’s Monthly
stained with lemon pie dropped when I was too deep into a story to be
careful. Here I read my first Dickens, my first Thackeray, my first Marian
Evans, as George Eliot then signed herself. My first Wilkie Collins came to
me in the Weekly. Great literature—all pirated, I was to learn much later.
My friend Viola Roseboro tells me that at this time she was reading
Harper’s pirated paper-bound copies of Dickens. It was much later that they
came my way.
However, all the reading I was doing was not so respectable. On the sly I
was devouring a sheet forbidden to the household—the Police Gazette—the
property of the men around the house, for we had men around the house,
men of various degrees of acceptability to my mother, but all necessary to

my father’s enterprises. The business had grown; it meant a clerk, bosses,
workmen. In a pioneer community like ours it was hard to find comfortable
living quarters for single men. My father and mother, both brought up on
farms, accepted as a matter of course the housing and feeding of hired men.
So it was in line with their experience as well as with the necessities of the
case that our household was arranged to take care of a certain number of
men connected with my father’s business. For sleeping quarters a
bunkhouse was built on the hillside; mornings and evenings, they sat at the
family table. This accepting men of whose manners and ways she often
heartily disapproved was distasteful to my mother; but she had not been a
schoolteacher for nothing, and she applied her notions of discipline. She
would not have swearing, drinking, rough manners, and certainly she would
not have had the Police Gazette in the house. But the men had it, and now
and then when my brother and I played about the bunkhouse it was easy for
me to pick up a copy and slip it away where my dearest girl friend and I
looked unashamed and entirely unknowing on its rough and brutal pictures.
If they were obscene we certainly never knew it. There was a wanton gaiety
about the women, a violent rakishness about the men—wicked, we
supposed, but not the less interesting for that.
One reason the Police Gazette fascinated me was that it pictured a kind
of life I knew to be flourishing in a neighboring settlement, a settlement
where my father had shops run by a boss who, as well as his sister, was a
family friend, and where I was often allowed to visit. This settlement,
Petroleum Center, had by something like general consent become Oil
Creek’s “sink of iniquity.”
The discovery of oil, the growing certainty that it was the beginning of a
new industry, that money was flowing into the Oil Region quickly brought
an invading host of men and women seeking fortunes. It was a new and rich
field for tricksters, swindlers, exploiters of vice in every known form. They
were soon setting up shops in every settlement and, to the credit of the
manhood of the Oil Region, usually being driven out by self-directed
vigilantes.
At Rouseville a “joy boat” which made its way up the Creek that first
winter and tied up near my father’s shop was cut loose in the middle of the
night after its arrival. Its visitors found themselves floating down the
Allegheny River the next morning and obliged to walk back. From that time

open vice shunned the town. But when wealth poured out of the ground at
Petroleum Center there was too great excitement to think of order, decency.
Before it was realized, the town was alive with every known form of
wantonness and wickedness. By the time I was allowed to visit our friends
there, I saw from the corner of my eye as I walked sedately the length of the
street saloons, dance halls, brothels; and I noted many curious things. The
house where I visited stood on a slope overlooking one of the most
notorious dance halls of the Oil Region—Gus Reil’s. Often I left my bed at
night and watched that long low building from which rose loud laughter,
ribald songs, shouts, curses. Later horror was added to Gus Reil’s
fascination, for here a Rouseville boy was shot one night.
If Petroleum Center was giving me an opportunity to feed my curiosity
about things in the world of which I was not supposed to know, it happened
also to be the indirect means of awaking my interest in the stars, one of the
most beautiful interests of my youth. My father had seen the early passing
of the wooden oil tank, the coming of the iron tank, and had used his capital
to become an oil producer. One of his first investments had been in an oil
farm on the hills above the wicked town which so excited my curiosity. His
partner in this venture, M. E. Hess, lived on this farm with his family. In
that family was a daughter about my age and bearing my name—Ida. We
became friends and visited back and forth as chance offered. My chance
came often when Mr. Hess, riding with a companion over the hills to
Rouseville to consult with father, dropped his companion and took me back
with him, usually at night. A fine pair of saddle horses he had—“High Fly”
and “Shoo Fly.” My first experience in horseback riding was following him
on “Shoo Fly” over the hills after dark.
Mr. Hess was an altogether unusual man, educated, with a vein of poetry
in him. As we rode he would stop every now and then to name the stars,
trace the constellations, repeat the legends. My first consciousness of space,
its beauty, its something more than beauty, came then.
Not a bad counterbalance for what I was gathering in the town below the
farm on the hill and seeing reproduced in the Police Gazette, which so
perfectly pictured its activities.
But there were other correcting forces at work on me. The men who
formed the vigilante committee to make Rouseville difficult for

commercialized vice (my father one of them) set themselves early to
establishing civilizing agencies—first a church.
It was decided by the men and women who were to build and support this
church that it should be of the denomination of which there were the largest
number in the community. The Methodists had the numbers, and so my
father and mother who were Presbyterians became and remained
Methodists. Their support was active. We did not merely go to church; we
stayed to class meeting; we went to Sunday school, where both father and
mother had classes; we went to Wednesday night—or was it Thursday
night?—prayer meeting. And when there was a revival we went every night.
In my tenth or eleventh year I “went forward” not from a sense of guilt but
because everybody else was doing it. My sense of sin came after it was all
over and I was tucked away in bed at night. I had been keenly conscious as
I knelt at the Mourners’ bench that the long crimson ribbons which hung
from my hat must look beautiful on my cream-colored coat. The realization
of that hypocrisy cut me to the heart. I knew myself a sinner then, and the
relief I sought in prayer was genuine. I never confessed. It wasn’t the kind
of sin other converts talked about. But it aroused self-observation; I learned
that often when I was saying the polite or proper thing I was thinking quite
differently. For a long time it made me secretly unhappy thinking that in me
alone ran an underground river of thought. Later I began to suspect that
other people were like this, that always there flowed a stream of unspoken
thought under the spoken thought. It made me wary of strangers.
A side of my life which moves me deeply now, as I think back, was the
continuous effort of my father and mother to give me what were called
advantages, to use their increasing income to awaken and develop in me a
taste for things which they had always been denied. They wanted music in
the household and our grandest possession became a splendid Bradbury
square piano—a really noble instrument—with one of the finest, mellowest
tones that I have ever heard in a piano.
A music teacher turned up in the community and I was at once set at five-
finger exercises, and I was kept at them and all that follows them for many
years; but I found no joy in what I was doing. It is possible that with
different teachers from those available there might have been a spring
touched, for untrained as I am I am not without a certain appreciation of
music.

I mastered the mechanics of piano playing well enough, however, to
become later one of the regular performers in the high school in the town to
which we were to move—Titusville, Pennsylvania. I remembered nothing
of this until two of my old friends in Titusville, school chums, told me that I
was one of the three or four who played the piano for the morning
exercises, that I sometimes played my show pieces, and that on one
occasion I was an actor in a scene which they recalled with glee. They told
me I was playing a duet with a classmate. We either lost our place or did not
agree as to time—stopped entirely, argued the matter out, began over, and
this time went through without dissension; but I have only this secondhand
memory of my contribution to the musical life of the Titusville High
School.
I remember the efforts of my father and mother to show me something of
the outside world much more clearly than I do those to awaken my interest
in books and music. There were little trips, once as far as Cleveland—the
whole family—the marvel of the “best hotel,” of new hats and coats and
armfuls of toys. There were summers at the farm, only thirty miles away.
Best remembered and most enjoyed were the all-day-excursion picnics. No
one can understand the social life of a great body of the American people in
the latter part of the nineteenth century without understanding the hold the
picnic had on them. The Tarbell household took the picnic so seriously that
it had a special equipment of stout market baskets, tin cups and plates, steel
knives and forks, tin spoons, worn napkins (the paper ones were then
unheard of). The menus were as fixed as that for a Thanksgiving dinner:
veal loaf, cold tongue, hard-boiled eggs—“two apiece”—buttered rusks,
spiced peaches, jelly, cucumber pickles, chowchow, cookies, doughnuts (we
called them fried cakes), and a special family cake. And you ate until you
were full.
Our grandest picnic excursions in those days were to Chautauqua Lake, a
charming sheet of water only some fifty miles from home. Near the head of
the lake lay an old Chautauqua County town, Mayville; at its foot,
Jamestown where my father for several years had been a student in the
Academy, and from which in vacations he had gone on his annual trips
down the Ohio. Loaded with big baskets of lunch, we took an early train to
Mayville, changed there to a little white steamer: zigzagged the length of
the lake, twenty or so miles, stopping at point after point. We ate our lunch
en route, and at Jamestown went uptown to drink a bottle of “pop.” And

then came the slow return home, where we arrived after dark exhausted by
pleasure.
Three or four miles from Mayville on the west side of the lake jutted a
wooded promontory—Fair Point—the site in those days of a Methodist
camp meeting; and here we sometimes stopped for the day. We never liked
it so well as going to Jamestown; neither did father.

2
I DECIDE TO BE A BIOLOGIST

Five years went by in the house on the hill, and then in 1870 when I was
thirteen I found myself in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in a new house my
father had built. How characteristic of the instability of the oil towns of that
day, as well as of the frugality of my father, was this house! From the
beginning of the Pithole excitement he had, as I have said, made money—
more than he could ever have dreamed, I fancy; and then about 1869
practically without warning the bottom fell out, as the vernacular of the
region put it. The end shut up my father’s shops there, but it also gave us
the makings of a home. In that rapid development, only four years long, a
town of some twenty thousand had grown up with several big hotels—
among them, one called the Bonta House. It had features which delighted
my father—long French windows, really fine iron brackets supporting its
verandahs, handsome woodwork. The Bonta House was said to have cost
$60,000, but its owners were glad to take the $600 father offered when the
town “blew up.” He paid the money, tore down the building, loaded its iron
brackets and fine doors and windows, mouldings and all, and I suppose
much of its timber, onto wagons and carted it ten miles away to Titusville
where, out of it, he built the house which was our home for many years.
Titusville was not like Rouseville, which had suddenly sprung from the
mud as uncertain as a mushroom of the future. It had been a substantial
settlement twenty years before oil was found there, small but sturdy with a
few families who had made money chiefly in lumber, owning good homes,
carefully guarding the order and decency of the place.
The discovery of oil overran the settlement with hundreds of fortune
seekers. They came from far and near, on foot, horseback, wagon. The
nearest railroad connection was sixteen miles away, and the roads and fields

leading in were soon cut beyond recognition by the heavy hauling, its
streets at times impassable with mud.
The new industry demanded machinery, tools, lumber—and the bigger it
grew, the greater the demand. Titusville, the birthplace of all this activity, as
well as the gateway down the Creek, must furnish food and shelter for
caravans of strangers, shops for their trades, offices for speculators and
brokers, dealers in oil lands and leases, for oil producers, surveyors, and
draftsmen—all the factors of the big business organization necessary to
develop the industry. In 1862 the overflow was doubled by the arrival of a
railroad with a connection sixteen miles away with the East and West. The
disbanding of the Army in June of 1865 brought a new rush—men still in
uniform, their rifles and knapsacks on their backs. Most of this fresh inflow
was bound to the scene of the latest excitement, Pithole.
Stampeded though she was, Titusville refused to give up her idea of what
a town should be. She kept a kind of order, waged a steady fight on
pickpockets, drunkards, wantons; and in this she was backed by the
growing number of men and women who, having found their chance for
fortune in oil, wanted a town fit for their families. After churches, the
schools were receiving the most attention. It was the Titusville schools
which had determined my father and mother to make the town their
permanent home.
But school did not play a serious part in my scheme of things at the start.
I went because I was sent, and had no interest in what went on. I was
thirteen, but I had never been in a crowded room before. In a small private
school the teacher had been my friend. Here I was not conscious my teacher
recognized my existence. I soon became a truant; but the competent ruler of
that schoolroom knew more than I realized. She was able to spot a truant,
and one day when I turned up after an unexplainable absence she suddenly
turned on me and read me a scathing lecture. I cannot remember that I was
ashamed or humiliated, only amazed, but something in me asserted itself. I
suppose that here a decent respect for the opinions of mankind was born; at
least I became on the instant a model pupil.
A few months later I passed into high school; and when at the end of the
year the grades were averaged at a ceremony where everybody was present
I stood at the head of the honor roll. Nobody could have been more
surprised. I had not been working for the honor roll: I had simply been

doing what they expected me to do as I understood it, and here I was at the
top. I remember I felt very serious about it. Having made the top once, I
knew what would be expected of me. I couldn’t let my father and mother or
my teachers down, so I continued to learn my lessons. It was a good deal
like being good at a game. I liked to work out the mathematics and
translations—good puzzles, but that they had any relation to my life I was
unconscious. And then suddenly, among these puzzles I was set to solve, I
found in certain textbooks the sesame which was to free my curiosity, stir
desires to know, set me working on my own to find out more than these
books had to offer. The texts which did all this for me were a series I
suspect a modern teacher might laugh at—Steele’s Fourteen Weeks in
Zoology, Geology, Botany, Natural Philosophy, Chemistry.
Here I was suddenly on a ground which meant something to me. From
childhood, plants, insects, stones were what I saw when I went abroad, what
I brought home to press, to put into bottles, to “litter up the house.” The
hills about Rouseville were rich in treasures for such a collector, but nobody
had ever taught me more than their common names. I had never realized
that they were subjects for study, like Latin and geometry and rhetoric and
other such unmeaning tasks. They were too fascinating. But here my
pleasure became my duty. School suddenly became exciting. Now I could
justify my tramps before breakfast on the hills, justify my “collections,” and
soon I knew what I was to be—a scientist. Life was beginning to be very
good, for what I liked best to do had a reason. No doubt this uplift was
helped by the general cheerfulness of the family under our new conditions
of life.
Things were going well in father’s business; there was ease such as we
had never known, luxuries we had never heard of. Our first Christmas in the
new home was celebrated lavishly. Far away was that first Christmas in the
shanty on the flats when there was nothing but nuts and candy and my
mother and father promising, “Just wait, just wait, the day will come.” The
day had come—a gorgeous Christmas tree, a velvet cloak, and a fur coat for
my mother. I haven’t the least idea what there was for the rest of us, but
those coats were an epoch in my life—my first notion of elegance.
This family blossoming was characteristic of the town. Titusville was
gay, confident of its future. It was spending money on schools and
churches, was building an Opera House where Janauschek soon was to play,

Christine Nilsson to sing. More and more fine homes were going up. Its
main street had been graded and worked until fine afternoons, winter and
summer, it was cleared by four o’clock for the trotting of the fast horses the
rich were importing. When New Year’s Day came every woman received—
wine, cakes, salads, cold meats on the table—every man went calling. That
is, Titusville was taking on metropolitan airs, led by a few citizens who
knew New York and its ways, even spoke familiarly of Jay Gould and Jim
Fisk, both of whom naturally enough had their eye on us. Did not the Erie
road from which they at the moment were filling their pockets regard oil as
one of its most profitable freights? We were grain for their mill.
There was reason for confidence. In the dozen years since the first well
was drilled the Oil Creek Valley had yielded nearly thirty-three million
barrels of crude oil. Producing, transporting, refining, marketing, exporting,
and by-products had been developed into an organized industry which was
now believed to have a splendid future.
Then suddenly this gay, prosperous town received a blow between the
eyes. Self-dependent in all but transportation and locally in that through the
pipe lines it was rapidly laying to shipping points, it was dependent on the
railroads for the carrying of its crude oil to outside refining points and for a
shipping of both crude and refined to the seaboard—a rich and steady traffic
for which the Oil Region felt the railroads ought to be grateful; but it was
the railroads that struck the blow. A few refiners outside the region—
Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia—concocted a marvelous scheme which
they had the persuasive power to put over with the railroads, a big scheme
by which those in the ring would be able to ship crude and refined oil more
cheaply than anybody outside. And then, marvelous invention, they would
receive in addition to their advantage a drawback on every barrel of oil
shipped by any one not in the group. Those in the South Improvement
Company, as the masterpiece was called, were to be rewarded for shipping;
and those not in, to be doubly penalized. Of course it was a secret scheme.
The Oil Region did not learn of it until it had actually been put into
operation in Cleveland, Ohio, and leaked out. What did it mean to the Oil
Region? It meant that the man who produced the oil, and all outside
refiners, were entirely at the mercy of this group who, if they would, could
make the price of crude oil as well as refined. But it was a plan which could
not survive daylight. As soon as the Oil Region learned of it a wonderful
row followed. There were nightly antimonopoly meetings, violent speeches,

processions; trains of oil cars loaded for members of the offending
corporation were raided, the oil run on the ground, their buyers turned out
of the oil exchanges; appeals were made to the state legislature, to Congress
for an interstate commerce bill, producers and refiners uniting for
protection. I remember a night when my father came home with a grim look
on his face and told how he with scores of other producers had signed a
pledge not to sell to the Cleveland ogre that alone had profited from the
scheme—a new name, that of the Standard Oil Company, replacing the
name South Improvement Company in popular contempt.
There were long days of excitement. Father coming home at night, silent
and stern, a sternness even unchanged by his after-dinner cigar, which had
come to stand in my mind as the sign of his relaxation after a hard day. He
no longer told of the funny things he had seen and heard during the day; he
no longer played his jew’s-harp, nor sang to my little sister on the arm of
his chair the verses we had all been brought up on:
Augusta, Maine, on the Kennebec River,
Concord, New Hampshire, on the Merrimack, etc.

The commotion spread. The leaders of the New York Petroleum
Association left out of the original conspiracy, and in a number of cases (as
was soon to be shown) outraged chiefly for that reason, sent a committee to
the Oil Region to see what was doing. The committee was joyfully
welcomed, partly because its chairman was well known to them all. It was
my Rouseville neighbor, Henry H. Rogers.
Mr. Rogers had left the Creek in 1867 and become a partner in the Pratt
firm of refiners and exporters of Brooklyn, New York. He and his associates
saw as clearly as his old friends in the Oil Region that—let the South
Improvement Company succeed in its plan for a monopoly—everybody not
in the ring would be forced to go out of business. The New York men seem
to have been convinced that the plans for saving themselves which the
organized producers and refiners were laying stood a good chance of
success, for back in New York Mr. Rogers gave a long interview to the
Herald. He did not mince words. Cleveland and Pittsburgh were “straining
every nerve to create a monopoly.” They would succeed if their control of
the railroads continued. He and his fellows felt as the men in the Oil Region
did, that the breaking up of the South Improvement Company was a
“necessity for self-existence.” They were as bold in action as in words, for

when a little later the president of the Standard Oil Company of Cleveland,
John D. Rockefeller (to date, the only beneficiary of the South
Improvement Company), sought an interview in New York with Mr. Rogers
and his committee he was treated cavalierly and according to the
newspapers retreated after a brief reception “looking badly crestfallen.”
Thus was the Henry H. Rogers of 1872.
Out of the long struggle begun as a scrimmage came finally a well
developed cooperative movement guaranteeing fair play all around. It was
signed by the Standard Oil Company’s representative and all the oil-
carrying railroads. The railroads indeed were the first to succumb, knowing
as they did that what they were doing was contrary to the common law of
the land, and being thundered at as they were by the press and politicians of
all the country. “I told Willie not to go into that scheme,” said old
Commodore Vanderbilt; and Jay Gould whined, “I didn’t sign until
everybody else had.”
Out of the alarm and bitterness and confusion, I gathered from my
father’s talk a conviction to which I still hold—that what had been
undertaken was wrong. My father told me it was as if somebody had tried to
crowd me off the road. Now I knew very well that, on this road where our
little white horse trotted up and down, we had our side, there were rules,
you couldn’t use the road unless you obeyed those rules, it was not only bad
manners but dangerous to attempt to disobey them. The railroads—so said
my father—ran through the valley by the consent of the people; they had
given them a right of way. The road on which I trotted was a right of way.
One man had the same right as another, but the railroads had given to one
something they would not give to another. It was wrong. I sometimes hear
learned people arguing that in the days of this historic quarrel everybody
took rebates, it was the accepted way. If they had lived in the Oil Region
through those days in 1872, they would have realized that, far from being
accepted, it was fought tooth and nail. Everybody did not do it. In the nature
of the offense everybody could not do it. The strong wrested from the
railroads the privilege of preying upon the weak, and the railroads never
dared give the privilege save under promise of secrecy.
In walking through the world there is a choice for a man to make. He can
choose the fair and open path, the path which sound ethics, sound
democracy, and the common law prescribe, or choose the secret way by

which he can get the better of his fellow man. It was that choice made by
powerful men that suddenly confronted the Oil Region. The sly, secret,
greedy way won in the end, and bitterness and unhappiness and incalculable
ethical deterioration for the country at large came out of that struggle and
others like it which were going on all over the country—an old struggle
with old defeats but never without men willing to make stiff fights for their
rights, even if it cost them all they ever hoped to possess.
At all events, uncomprehending as I was in that fine fight, there was born
in me a hatred of privilege—privilege of any sort. It was all pretty hazy to
be sure, but still it was well, at fifteen, to have one definite plank based on
things seen and heard, ready for a future platform of social and economic
justice if I should ever awake to my need of one. At the moment, however,
my reflection did not carry me beyond the wrongness of the privilege which
had so upset our world, contradicting as it did the principle of consideration
for others which had always been basic in our family and religious teaching.
I could not think further in this direction, for now my whole mind was
absorbed by the overwhelming discovery that the world was not made in six
days of twenty-four hours each.
My interest in science, which meant for me simply larger familiarity with
plants and animals and rocks, had set me looking over my father’s books.
Among them I found Hugh Miller’s “Testimony of the Rocks,” and sat
down to read it. Gradually I grasped with a combination of horror and
amazement that, instead of a creation, the earth was a growth—that the
creative days I had so clearly visualized were periods, eons long, not to be
visualized. It was all too clear to deny, backed as it was by a wealth of
geological facts. If this were true, why did the Bible describe so particularly
the work of each day, describe it and declare, “And the evening and the
morning were the first day,” etc., and end, “and he rested on the seventh
day”? Hugh Miller labored to prove that there was no necessary
contradiction between Genesis and Geology. But I was too startled to accept
what he said. A Bible that needed reconciling, that did not mean what it
said, was not the rock I had supposed my feet were on; that words could
have other meaning than that I had always given them, I had not yet
grasped.
I was soon to find that the biblical day was disturbing a great part of the
Christian world, was a chief point of controversy in the church. I had hardly

made my discovery when Genesis and Geology appeared in the pulpit of
the Methodist Church of Titusville, Pennsylvania. Filling this pulpit at that
time was a remarkable and brilliant man, Amos Norton Craft. Dr. Craft was
an indefatigable student. It was told of him to the wonder of the church that
he laid aside yearly $200 of his meager salary to buy books. Like all the
ministers of those days, he was obliged to face the challenges of science.
Many of his fellows—most of them, so far as my knowledge went—took
refuge in heated declarations that the conclusions that science was making
were profane, godless, an affront to divinity. Not so Dr. Craft. He accepted
them, strove to fit them into the Christian system. He startled his
congregation and interested the town profoundly by announcing an evening
course of lectures on the reconciliation of Genesis and Geology. The first of
the series dealt with the universe. I had never known there was one. The
stars, yes. I could name planets and constellations and liked nothing better
than to lie on my back and watch them; but a universe with figures of its
size was staggering. I went away from those Sunday night lectures
fascinated, horror-stricken, confused—a most miserable child, for not only
was my idea of the world shattered, not only was I left dizzily gyrating in a
space to which there was no end, but the whole Christian system I had been
taught was falling in a general ruin. I began to feel that I ought to leave the
church. I did not believe what I was supposed to believe. I did not have the
consolation of pride in emancipation which I find youth frequently has
when it finds itself obliged to desert the views it has been taught. Indeed, I
doubted greatly whether it was an emancipation. What troubled me most
was that if I gave up the church I had nothing to put in place of something it
had given me which seemed to me of supreme importance; summed up, that
something was in the commandment, “Do as you would be done by.”
Certainly nothing which Hugh Miller or Herbert Spencer, whom I began to
read in 1872 in the Popular Science Monthly, helped me here. They gave
me nothing to take the place of what had always been the unwritten law of
the Tarbell household, based as I knew upon the teachings of the Bible. The
gist of the Bible, as it had come to me, was what I later came to call the
brotherhood of man. Practically it was that we should do nothing, say
nothing, that injured another. That was a catastrophe, and when it happened
in our household—an inarticulate household on the whole, though one
extraordinarily conscious of the minds and hearts of one another—when it
happened the whole household was shadowed for hours and it was not until

by sensitive unspoken efforts the injured one had been consoled, that we
went on about our usual ways.
This was something too precious to give up, and something for which I
did not find a substitute in the scientific thinking and arguing in which I was
floundering. The scientists offered me nothing to guide me in human
relations, and they did not satisfy a craving from which I could not escape;
that was the need of direction, the need of that which I called God and
which I still call God. Perhaps I was a calculating person, a cautious one. At
all events I made up my mind to wait and find out something which better
took the place of those things which I so valued. It cost me curious little
compromises, compromises that I had to argue myself into. The chief came
in repeating the creed.
I could repeat, “conceived of the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary,”
because for many years I did not know what that meant. It was the
resurrection that disturbed me. I could not accept it, nor could I accept the
promise of personal immortality. That had become a grave doubt with me
when I first grew dizzy with the consciousness of the vastness of the
universe. Why should I expect to exist forever as a conscious mind in that
vast emptiness? What would become of me? I did not want to think about it,
and I came then to a conviction that has never left me: that as far as I am
concerned immortality is not my business, that there is too much for me to
attend to in this mortal life without overspeculation on the immortal, that it
is not necessary to my peace of mind or to my effort to be a decent and
useful person, to have a definite assurance about the affairs of the next
world. I say this with humility, for I believe that some such assurance is
necessary to the peace and usefulness of many persons, and I am the last to
scoff at the revelations they claim.
And yet it was hard to give up heaven. Among the books on our shelves
—many of them orthodox religious books—was one that had a frontispiece
which I had accepted as a definite picture of the heaven to which I was to
go. Jehovah sat on a throne, cherubim and seraphim around him, rank upon
rank of angels filling the great amphitheater below. I always wondered
where my place would be, and whether there would be any chance to work
up in heaven as there seemed to be on earth, to become a cherub.
But giving up this heaven was by no means the greatest tragedy in my
discovery that the world was not made in six days of twenty-four hours

each. The real tragedy was the birth in me of doubt and uncertainty.
Nothing was ever again to be final. Always I was to ask myself when
confronted with a problem, a system, a scheme, a code, a leader, “How can
I accept without knowing more?” The quest of the truth had been born in
me—the most tragic and incomplete, as well as the most essential, of man’s
quests.
It was while groping my way, frightened like a lost child, I found a word
to hold to—evolution. Things grew. What did they grow from? They all
started somewhere. I was soon applying the idea. Nothing seemed to matter
now, except to find the starting point of things and, having that, see why
and how they grew into something else. How were you to go to work to
find the start of life? With a microscope. And I soon was in the heat of my
first intellectual passion, my first and greatest—that for the microscope.
With a microscope I could perhaps get an answer to my mystification about
the beginning of life, where it started; and then, I believed, I should find
God again.
I was a practical person apparently, for I at once began to save my money
and soon had enough to put into a small instrument. The house in Titusville,
like many of its period, had a tower room, a steep staircase running up to it.
This room was surrounded on three sides with big double windows. I
begged to have it for my own. Here I was allowed to set up shop; here I had
my desk, my papers, and my microscope; here I was alone with my
problems. That little microscope had a good deal to do with my
determination to go to college. If I was to become a microscopist—I had
already adopted that word—I must study, get an education.
This determination of mine to get an education, go to college, was chiefly
due, no doubt, to the active crusade going on in those days for what we
called woman’s rights. Ours was a yeasty time, the ferment reaching into
every relation of life, attacking and remodeling every tradition, every
philosophy. As my father was hard hit by the attack on his conception of
individualism in a democracy—freedom with strictest consideration for the
rights and needs of others—as I was struggling with all the handicaps of my
ignorance, with the nature of life, a search for God, so my mother was
facing a little reluctantly a readjustment of her status in the home and in
society. She had grown up with the Woman’s Rights movement. Had she
never married, I feel sure she would have sought to “vindicate her sex” by

seeking a higher education, possibly a profession. The fight would have
delighted her. If she had gone to Iowa she surely would have soon joined
the agitation led there in the late fifties by Amelia Bloomer, the inventor of
the practical and ugly costume which still carries her name, the real founder
of dress reform. We owe it to Amelia Bloomer that we can without public
ridicule wear short skirts and stout boots, be as sensible as our feminine
natures permit—which is not saying much for us when it comes to fashions.
But my mother found herself a pioneer in the Oil Region, confronted by the
sternest of problems which were to be settled only by immediate individual
effort and good will.
The move to Titusville, however, soon put my mother in touch with the
crusade for equal political rights which was taking the place of the earlier
movement for woman’s rights. The Civil War had slowed up that agitation;
indeed, many of its best talking points had been conceded and were slowly
going into practice. Most of the militants had thrown themselves into war
work and, after the war, into the campaign for negro suffrage; but the
passing of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, for the first time introducing
the word “male” into the Constitution, aroused a sense of outrage, not only
in the advocates of equal rights but in many women who had not approved
of previous agitations. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the
greatest of the early leaders, failing to keep the humiliating distinction out
of the Amendment, began a tremendous national crusade for woman’s
suffrage. They marshaled a group of splendid women and undertook an
intensive campaign meant to reach every woman in the country. It reached
us in Titusville, even reached our home where my father and mother,
always hospitable to crusaders, opened their doors to them. I remember best
Mary Livermore and Frances Willard—not that either touched me, saw me;
of this neglect I was acutely conscious. I noted, too, that the men we
entertained did notice me, talked to me as a person—not merely as a
possible member of a society they were promoting. There was Neal Dow—
father by this time was a prohibitionist—who let me show him our Dante
with Gustave Doré’s pictures. Men were nicer than women to me, I
mentally noted.
As the struggle for equal rights grew in heat I became aware that it was
far from a united struggle, that as a matter of fact leaders and followers
were spending almost as much time disapproving of one another’s methods
as fighting for their cause. The friction came largely from the propensity of

Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony to form alliances shocking to many of their
oldest and wisest friends. Before the war they had, rather recklessly from a
political point of view, supported easier divorce. As one of their friends
wrote them, they had in so doing broken the heart of the portly Evening
Post and nearly driven the Tribune to the grave. Time had not cooled their
ardor for strange bedfellows. They made an alliance now of which I heard
no little talk by my mother and her friends; it was with the two most
notorious women in the eye of the public at the moment. “Hussies,”
conservative circles in Titusville, Pennsylvania, called them—Victoria
Woodhull and Tennessee Claflin.
It was not difficult for even a girl of fifteen to pick up some idea of what
these women were, so well did they advertise themselves, and so
delightedly did the press back them up in their doings. Beginning their
careers as clairvoyants, they had developed professionally their undoubted
powers until they were in the sixties—the two best known and best paid
trance-physicians of their day. Victoria claimed to have raised a child from
the dead, and Tennessee, the harder worker of the two, made enough money
to keep thirty-five relations in comfort. “If I am a humbug sometimes, look
at the dead beats I have to support,” was her answer to those who accused
her of abusing her talents. Both women frankly advocated free love, and so
it was believed quite as frankly practiced it.
With this equipment they entered Wall Street in the eighteen-sixties as
consultants. The “lady brokers,” they were called. They quickly built up a
profitable business. Old Commodore Vanderbilt was so tickled by their
combination of beauty and effrontery, talents and ambitions, that he is said
to have proposed marriage to Victoria. He was more valuable as a friend.
She kept his picture on the wall of the salon where she received her clients,
and under it the framed motto, “Simply to thy cross I cling.”
In 1870 Victoria Woodhull announced herself as a candidate for President
in 1872. So successful was she in attracting and holding big audiences, and
so brilliantly did she present the arguments for equal rights, that Mrs.
Stanton and Miss Anthony threw scruples to the wind and took her into
their camp—from which promptly there was a considerable exodus of
scandalized ladies. Not only did Victoria win the countenance of these two
great leaders, but she involved them in the Beecher-Tilton scandal, which
for months she worked steadily to force before the public.

The reverberations of the conflict inside the suffrage party, together with
what I picked up about the Beecher trial (I read the testimony word by word
in our newspapers), did not increase my regard for my sex. They did not
seem to substantiate what I heard about the subjection of women, nor did
what I observed nearer home convince me. Subjection seemed to me fairly
divided. That is all: I saw there were “henpecked men,” as well as
“downtrodden women.” The chief unfairness which I recognized was in the
handling of household expenses. Women who must do the spending were
obliged to ask for money or depend on charging. My mother had not been
trained to live on as generous a scale as was now possible, but my father
never said, “We have so much and no more to spend.” They worked often at
cross purposes. So I gathered as I listened to intimate talks between women,
listened to suffrage speakers, read the literature; so did many American
husbands and wives. I felt no restraint myself, for I always had at least a
little money and I, too, could charge. This foolish practice led me into funny
expenditures.
I had no sense of the appropriate in clothes. Often I had an ardent desire
for something fitted only for grown-ups, and I always had a keen ambition
to fit myself out for occasions. Some time in the early seventies Clara
Louise Kellogg came to town. My father and mother were in the West, but
they had arranged that I was to hear her. It seemed as if some kind of regalia
was necessary, so I charged a wide pink sash and a pair of yellow kid
gloves.
Out of the agitation for rights as it came to me, two rights that were
worth going after quite definitely segregated themselves: the right to an
education, and the right to earn my living—education and economic
independence.
The older I grew, the more determined I became to be independent. I saw
only one way—teach; but if I was to teach I must fit myself, go to college.
My father and mother agreed. I had a clear notion of what I wanted to teach
—natural science, particularly the microscope, for I was to be a biologist. I
made my choice—Cornell, first opened to women in 1872; but at the
moment when the steps to enter Cornell were to be taken, there appeared in
the household as an over-Sunday guest the president of a small college in
our neighborhood, only thirty miles away, Allegheny. Among the patrons of
that college was the Methodist organization known as the Erie Conference,

to which the Titusville church belonged. I had heard of it annually when a
representative appeared in our pulpit, told its story and asked for support.
The president, Dr. Lucius Bugbee, was a delightful and entertaining guest
and, learning that I was headed Cornellward, adroitly painted the
advantages of Allegheny. It was near home; it was a ward of our church. It
had responded to the cry of women for educational opportunity and had
opened its doors before the institution I had chosen.
Was not here an opportunity for a serious young woman interested in the
advancement of her sex? Had I not a responsibility in the matter? If the few
colleges that had opened their doors were to keep them open, if others were
to imitate their example, two things were essential: women must prove they
wanted a college education by supporting those in their vicinity; and they
must prove by their scholarship what many doubted—that they had minds
as capable of development as young men. Allegheny had not a large
territory to draw from. I must be a pioneer.
As a matter of fact the only responsibility I had felt and assumed in going
to college was entirely selfish and personal. But the sense of responsibility
was not lacking nor dormant in me. It was one of the few things I had found
out about myself in the shanty on the flats when I was six years old and
there was a new baby in the family.
The woman looking after my mother had said, “Now you are old enough
to make a cup of tea and take it to her.” I think, in all my life since, nothing
has seemed more important, more wonderful to me than this being called
upon by an elder to do something for mother, be responsible for it. I can feel
that cup in my hand as I cautiously took it to the bed, and can see my
mother’s touching smile as she thanked me. Perhaps there came to her a
realization that this rebelling, experimenting child might one day become a
partner in the struggle for life so serious for her at the moment, always to be
more or less serious.
But to return to Dr. Bugbee and his argument; before he left the house I
had agreed to enter Allegheny in the fall of 1876. And that I did.
What did I take with me? Well, I took what from my earliest years I had
been told was necessary to everyone—a Purpose, always spelled with a
capital. I had an outline of the route which would lead to its realization.
Making outlines of what was in my mind was the one and only fruit that I
had gathered so far from long terms of struggle over grammar, rhetoric,

composition. Outlines which held together, I had discovered, cleared my
mind, gave it something to follow. I outlined all my plans as I had
diagramed sentences. It was not a poor beginning for one who eventually,
and by accident rather than by intention, was to earn her living by writing—
the core of which must be sound structure.
One thing by choice left out of the plan I carried from high school was
marriage. I would never marry. It would interfere with my plan; it would
fetter my freedom. I didn’t quite know what Freedom meant; certainly I was
far from realizing that it exists only in the spirit, never in human relations,
never in human activities—that the road to it is as often as not what men
call bondage. But above all I must be free; and to be free I must be a
spinster. When I was fourteen I was praying God on my knees to keep me
from marriage. I suspect that it was only an echo of the strident feminine
cry filling the air at that moment, the cry that woman was a slave in a man-
made world. By the time I was ready to go to college I had changed my
prayer for freedom to a will to freedom. Such was the baggage I carried to
college, where I was soon to find several things I had not counted on.

3
A COEDUCATIONAL COLLEGE OF THE
EIGHTIES

When I entered Allegheny College in the fall of 1876 I made my first
contact with the past. I had been born and reared a pioneer; I knew only the
beginning of things, the making of a home in a wilderness, the making of an
industry from the ground up. I had seen the hardships of beginnings, the joy
of realization, the attacks that success must expect; but of things with a past,
things that had made themselves permanent, I knew nothing. It struck me
full in the face now, for this was an old college as things west of the
Alleghenies were reckoned—an old college in an old town. Here was
history, and I had never met it before to recognize it.
The town lay in the valley of a tributary of the Allegheny River—French
Creek. Its oldest tradition after the tales of Indians was that George
Washington once drank from a spring on the edge of the campus. Certainly
he passed that way in 1753 when he came up the river valley from Fort
Duquesne (Pittsburgh), following the route which led to Fort Le Bœuf near
Lake Erie. He comments in his diary, published the year after his trip, on
the extensive rich meadows through which he had passed, one of which “I
believe was nearly four miles in length and considerable wider in some
places.” To this particular “rich meadow” a few years later came one David
Mead and laid out a town and sold land. Here soon after came the
representative of the Holland Land Company, colonizers of first quality.
Good men came, distinguished names in Pennsylvania’s history, and they
wanted a college. The answer to their wish came in 1815 when one of the
most scholarly men of that day, Timothy Alden of Massachusetts, heard
their call and, picking up all his worldly possessions, made the two months’
trip by coach and boat to the settlement called Meadville.

Timothy Alden, like many of his fellows, was fired by a deep belief that
through Christian democracy alone could men arrive at the better world
towards which he, scholar that he was, knew they had been groping from
their earliest beginnings. But men could only come to an understanding of
their individual and collective responsibilities to democracy through
education. Therefore, as men spread westward he and others like him must
follow them with education.
But once in Meadville how little he found with which to carry out his
project—a log courthouse for a schoolhouse, and little or no money, though
of what they had men gave freely. Now Timothy Alden knew that
throughout the East were men of scholarly traditions convinced as was he
that democracy would work only if men were trained to understanding and
sacrifice. He believed that they would help his Western venture. In 1816 he
went East to find out. He was not wrong in thinking there would be
sympathy for the young college. Out of their meager store men gave—this
one, fifty cents; that one, five dollars; few, more—and men gave books,
one, two, five. The list of donors now in the college archives shows many
of the best known names of the day—Lowell, Adams, Tucker, Parkman,
Channing in Boston and twenty-nine fine New York names. Friends were
made for Allegheny in every town and city where its brave story was told.
Timothy Alden came back with $361 in money and with books, more
needed than money, estimated to be worth $1,642.26.
From that time he kept the undertaking steadily before the East,
promoted it by every method known to the times. A great response to his
passionate effort came in 1819 when the college world of the East was
shocked by learning that William Bentley of Salem, Massachusetts, had left
his famous collection of “classical and theological books, dictionaries,
lexicons and Bibles” to a college in the wilderness of northwestern
Pennsylvania, a college without a home, still doing its work in a log
courthouse. That gift, long a bitter drop in the cup of Harvard, it is said,
made a home of its own necessity for Allegheny, and in 1820 the corner
stone of Bentley Hall, named for the donor, was laid. It took many years to
complete it; but, when done on the lines Timothy Alden had himself laid
down, it was one of the most beautiful buildings in the country. Today it
easily stands after Independence Hall as the most perfect piece of Colonial
architecture in the state of Pennsylvania. For me Bentley Hall was an

extraordinary experience. It was the first really beautiful building I had
seen, a revelation, something I had never dreamed of.
Fifty-six years had passed since the corner stone of Bentley Hall was
laid, and not one of them without disappointments and sacrifices. More than
once it had seemed as if the brave attempt must fail. Two buildings only had
been added in these years: Culver Hall, a frame boarding house for men;
Ruter Hall, a grim uncompromising three-story rectangular brick structure,
fifty by ninety feet in size, a perfect reflection of the straitened period to
which it belonged. The “Factory” was our slighting name for Ruter Hall,
but in this stern structure I was to find a second deep satisfaction—the
library; in a room on the top floor, ninety feet long and at least sixteen in
height was housed not only the splendid Bentley collection, but one even
more valuable, that of Judge James Winthrop of Cambridge, Massachusetts,
rare volumes from the great presses of Europe, three tons of books brought
overland in wagons by Boston teamsters in 1822. They lined the great
unbroken inside wall, as well as every space between openings. From the
window seats one looked out on the town in the valley, its roofs and towers
half hidden by a wealth of trees, and beyond to a circle of round-breasted
hills. Before I left Allegheny I had found a very precious thing in that
severe room—the companionship there is in the silent presence of books.
Allegheny did not of course admit women at the start; but the ferment
caused by the passing of the Fourteenth Amendment making it clear that
only men were to be regarded as citizens stirred the Allegheny constituents
mightily. Its chief patron, as I have said, was the Methodist Church. Now
the Methodist Church was a militant reformer. The greatest of its bishops,
Matthew Simpson, had backed Mrs. Stanton and Miss Anthony and their
colleagues at every step. Leaders among Methodist women had been
abolitionists, aggressive temperance advocates, and now they became
militant suffragists. Their influence began to tell. In 1870, with misgivings
in not a few minds the admission of women was voted. This was the same
year that the University of Michigan opened its doors to women, and two
years before Cornell. In the six years before I entered ten women had
graduated. When I came there were but two seniors, two juniors, no
sophomores. I was a lone freshman in a class of forty hostile or indifferent
boys. The friendly and facetious professor charged with the care of the
“young ladies” put it that I was “Lost in the Wilderness of Boy.”

From the first I was dimly conscious that I was an invader, that there was
abroad a spirit of masculinity challenging my right to be there, and there
were taboos not to be disregarded. My first experience was that of which
Virginia Woolf speaks so bitterly in “A Room of One’s Own”—the closing
of the college green to her at Oxbridge. Nearly fifty years before her book
was written I was having at Allegheny the same experience.
The sloping green of the campus below Bentley Hall was inviting.
Between classes I made my way one day to a seat under a tree only to hear
a horrified call from the walk above, “Come back, come back quick.” An
imperative summons from an upper-class woman. “You mustn’t go on that
side of the walk, only men go there.”
It was not so simple to find a spot where you could go and be
comfortable. If Bentley Hall, where all the classes were held, was a
beautiful piece of architecture, its interior could hardly have been more
severe. The rooms were heated with potbellied cast-iron stoves, seated with
the hardest wooden chairs, lighted by kerosene lamps. In winter (and the
winters were long) the snow tracked in kept the floors wet and cold. Often
one wore a muffler in chapel. But of all that I was unheeding. My pioneer
childhood served me well. Moreover, I realized at the start that I had found
what I had come to college for, direction in the only field in which I was
interested—science. I found it in a way that I doubt if Cornell could have
given me at the moment, shy and immature as I was: the warming and
contagious enthusiasm of a great natural teacher, one who had an ardent
passion for those things which had stirred me and a wide knowledge which
he fed by constant study and travel—Jeremiah Tingley, the head of
Allegheny’s department of natural science.
Professor Tingley was then a man of fifty, sparkling, alive, informal.
Three years before, he had been one of the fifty chosen from many hundred
applicants to spend the summer with Louis Agassiz on the island of
Penikese in Buzzards Bay. Agassiz had planned with enthusiasm for the
Penikese Summer School, and for those privileged to enter who could
understand and appreciate it was an unforgettable experience; certainly it
was for Jeremiah Tingley. He carried there Agassiz’s faith in observation
and classification, as well as his reverence for Nature and all her ways. For
both men the material world was but the cover of the spirit. Professor

Tingley would quote Agassiz sometimes: “Nature always brings us back to
absolute truth whenever we wander.”
This fervent faith had a profound and quieting effect on my religious
tumult. I learned a new word: Pantheism. Being still in that early stage of
development where there must be a definite word by which to classify
oneself, I began to call myself a pantheist—and I had a creed which I
repeated more often than the creed I had learned in childhood:
Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

It reassured me; I was on the right track, for was I not going to find out with
the microscope what God and man are?
Professor Tingley’s method for those he found really interested in
scientific study was to encourage them to look outside the book. There was
where I had already found my joy; but I suspected it was the willful way,
that the true way was to know first what was in the books. Here in Professor
Tingley’s classes you were ordered to go and see for yourself. He used to
tell us a story of his first experience at Penikese. A stone was put before
him, a round water-washed stone, on which he was to report. He looked at
the stone, turned it over. There was nothing to report. “It is not the outside,
it is the inside of things that matters,” said Agassiz. And in the laboratory
that became our watchword: Look inside.
Discovering my interest in the microscope, I was not only allowed, I was
urged to use the magnificent binocular belonging to the college, was given
the free run of the laboratory along with a few as crazy as myself. Here my
most exciting adventure apart from what I found under the microscope
came from actually having my hands on a “missing link.” Evolution, to
which I was clinging determinedly, could only be established, I realized, by
discovering the links. There was one peculiar to the waters in our valley, the
Memopomo Alleghaniensis, a creature twelve to fifteen inches long with
gills and one lung, able to live in the water or mud as circumstances
required. The mud puppy, as it was appropriately called, was slimy,
loathsome, but I worked over it with awe. Was I not being admitted into the
very workshop of Nature herself—seeing how she did it?

Professor Tingley took his little group of laboratory devotees into his
home circle. He and Mrs. Tingley were housed in a wing of Bentley Hall—
big rooms built for classrooms. They had no children, and in the years of
their study and travel they had gathered about them things of beauty and
interest. The atmosphere of those rooms was something quite new and
wonderful to me. It was my first look into the intimate social life possible to
people interested above all in ideas, beauty, music, and glad to work hard
and live simply to devote themselves to their cultivation.
And such good talks! Much of it was concerned with fresh scientific
thought, the inventions and discoveries which were stirring the world. An
omnivorous reader of the scientific publications of Europe and America,
Professor Tingley kept us excited, not only by what had been done but what
it might mean. There was the telephone. I had been in college but a few
weeks when my father asked me to go with him and my brother to the
Centennial Exposition of 1876. President Bugbee, who had made me his
special care for a time—Mrs. Bugbee even taking me into their home until
an appropriate boarding place could be found—was heartily in favor of my
going. I went, and when I returned Professor Tingley’s first question was,
“Did you see the telephone?” I hadn’t even heard of it. Two exhibits only of
that exposition made a deep enough impression on me to last until today—
my first Corot and the Corliss engine. Professor Tingley was greatly
disappointed, and I did not understand why until a few weeks later he called
the student body together to explain and illustrate the telephone by a
homemade instrument. “You’ll talk to your homes from these rooms one
day,” he told us. “New York will talk to Boston.” He didn’t suggest
Chicago. “Dreamer,” the boys said. “Dreamer,” my father and his Titusville
friends said a little later when an agent of the Bell Associates, the first
company to attempt putting the new invention within reach of everybody,
came to town selling stock. How often I heard it said later, “If I’d bought
that telephone stock!”
Years later I told Alexander Graham Bell of my introduction to the
telephone. “Nobody,” he said, “can estimate what the teachers of science in
colleges and high schools were doing in those days not only to spread
knowledge of the telephone but to stir youth to tackle the possibilities in
electricity.”

What I best remember is not the telephone but Professor Tingley’s
amazing enthusiasm for the telephone. This revelation of enthusiasm, its
power to warm and illuminate was one of the finest and most lasting of my
college experiences. The people I had known, teachers, preachers, doctors,
business men, all went through their day’s work either with a stubborn,
often sullen determination to do their whole duty, or with an undercurrent of
uneasiness, if they found pleasure in duty. They seemed to me to feel that
they were not really working if they were not demonstrating the Puritan
teaching that labor is a curse. It had never seemed so to me, but I did not
dare gloat over it. And here was a teacher who did gloat over his job in all
its ramifications. Moreover, he did his best to stir you to share his joy.
But while I looked on what I was learning in the laboratory as what I had
come to college for, while each term stiffened my ambition to go deeper
and deeper into the search for the original atom, science was not all that
interested me. The faculty, if small, was made up largely of seasoned men
with a perspective on life. There was not only deep seriousness but humor
and tolerance, and since we were so small a college the student was close
enough to discover them, to find out what each man as an individual had to
offer him. As I learned the power of enthusiasm from Jeremiah Tingley, I
learned from another man of that faculty the value of contempt. Holding the
chair of Latin was one of the few able teachers I have known, George
Haskins, father of that sound scholar of international repute, the late Charles
Homer Haskins, at the time of his death Professor Emeritus of Medieval
History at Harvard University. What deep satisfaction his career gave his
father, himself a man of many disappointments!
George Haskins labored, usually in vain, to arouse us to the choiceness of
Latinity, the meaning of Rome’s rise and fall, the quality of her men, the
relation of that life to ours. Professor Haskins’ contempt for our lack of
understanding, for our slack preparation, was something utterly new to me
in human intercourse. The people I knew with rare exceptions spared one
another’s feelings. I had come to consider that a superior grace; you must be
kind if you lied for it. But here was a man who turned on indifference,
neglect, carelessness with bitter and caustic contempt, left his victim seared.
The sufferers lived to say, some of them at least: “I deserved it. He was
never unjust, never inappreciative of effort.”

“Cherish your contempts,” Henry James advised me once when he had
drawn from me a confession of the conflict between my natural dislike of
saying anything unpleasant about anybody and the necessity of being cruel,
even brutal, if the work I had undertaken was to be truthful in fact and
logic. “Cherish your contempts,” said Mr. James, “and strength to your
elbow.” If it had not been for George Haskins I doubt if I should have
known what he meant; nor should I ever have become the steady, rather
dogged worker I am. The contempt for shiftlessness which he inspired in
me aroused a determination to be a good worker. I began to train my mind
to go at its task regularly, keep hours, study whether I liked a thing or not. I
forced myself not to waste time, not to loaf, not to give up before I finished.
If I failed at any point in this discipline I suffered a certain mental and
spiritual malaise, a dissatisfaction with myself hard to live with.
In spite of my painful efforts to make a regular worker out of myself, life
at college was lightened by my discovery of the Boy. Incredible as it seems
to me now, I had come to college at eighteen without ever having dared to
look fully into the face of any boy of my age. To be sure, I had from
childhood nourished secret passions for a succession of older individuals
whom I never saw except at a distance, and with whom I never exchanged a
word. My brother and his friends, my father and his friends—these I had
always hobnobbed with; but those who naturally should have been my
companions, I shunned. I was unable to take part in those things that
brought the young people of the day together. I did not dance—the
Methodist discipline forbade it. I was incredibly stupid and uninterested in
games—still am. I had no easy companionable ways, was too shy to attempt
them. I had my delights; the hills which I ran, the long drives behind our
little white horse, the family doings, the reading of French regularly with
my splendid friend Annette Grumbine, still living, still as she was then a
vitalizing influence in the town and state for all that makes for a higher
social life—these things and my precious evening walks, the full length of
Titusville’s main street, alone or with some girl friend while we talked of
things deepest in our minds.
But in all this there was no boy. I was not long in discovering him when I
reached Allegheny, for the taboos I encountered at the start soon yielded
under the increased number of women, women in college, in special
courses, in the Preparatory Department. They swept masculine prohibitions
out of the way—took possession, made a different kind of institution of it,

less scholastic, gayer, easier-going. The daily association in the classrooms,
the contacts and appraisements, the mutual interests and intimacies, the
continual procession of college doings which in the nature of things
required that you should have a masculine attendant, soon put me at my
ease. I was learning, learning fast, but the learning carried its pains. I still
had a stiff-necked determination to be free. To avoid entangling alliances of
all kinds had become an obsession with me. I was slow in laying it aside
when I began to take part in the social life of the college, and because of it I
was guilty of one performance which was properly enough a scandal to the
young men.
There were several men’s fraternities in the college; most of the boys
belonged to one or another. It was an ambition of the fraternities to put their
pins on acceptable town and college girls. You were a Delta girl, or a
Gamma girl or a Phi Psi girl. I resented this effort to tag me. Why should I
not have friends in all the fraternities? And I had; I accumulated four pins
and then, one disastrous morning, went into chapel with the four pins on my
coat. There were a few months after that when, if it had not been for two or
three non-Frat friends, I should have been a social outcast.
I spent four years in Allegheny College. Measured by what I got instead
of by what I did not get and was obliged to learn later, I regard them as
among the most profitable of my life. I find often that men and women
accuse the college of not opening their minds to life as it is in the world. For
a mind sufficiently developed to see “life as it is” I cannot conceive a more
fruitful field than the classics. If I had been sufficiently mature I could have
learned from George Haskins’ teachings of Cicero and Tacitus and Livy
more than I know today about the ways of men in their personal and their
national relations, more of the causes of war, of the weaknesses of
governments. But I was not ready for it. Life is the great teacher, and she
leads us step by step. It is not the fault of the human teacher that his pupil
must learn to climb by climbing.
It was in the spring of 1880 that I graduated. I still carried the same
baggage with which I had entered—a little heavier to be sure, a little better
packed, a little better adapted to the “Purpose.” The only difference which
threatened disturbance was that I had added an item which I had refused to
bring with me in 1876. Then I was not willing to believe I would ever marry
—now I thought possibly some day I might; but the item was not heavy, not

heavy enough at least to prevent my rejoicing over the fact that I was
graduating with a job. I had signed a contract with an institution of which I
had never heard until the negotiations leading to it opened. After frequent
communications with the faculty a representative of the Poland Union
Seminary of Poland, Ohio, with some misgivings had employed me to serve
as its Preceptress—$500 a year “and board yourself.” I was jubilant. It
meant economic independence—the first plank in my platform. I would use
my leisure to work with the microscope; I would save my money; I would
one day go abroad and study with some great biologist. I would never
abandon my search for the beginning of life, the point where I expected to
find God.
It was then with entire confidence in the future that I started out in
August of 1880 for the town of Poland on the Western Reserve of Ohio, to
begin what women were then talking of in more or less awed tones as a
Career.

4
A START AND A RETREAT

If I had been going on my honeymoon I should scarcely have been more
expectant or more curious than I was in August of 1880 when I left home to
take my first position: “Preceptress of Poland Union Seminary, Poland,
Mahoning County, Ohio—$500.00 a year and board yourself”! Poland was
not a long journey from my home—four or five hours.
I found the village delightful. It had the air of having been long in
existence, as it had. Here there was no noise of railroads, no sign of the coal
and steel and iron industries which encircled it but had never passed its
boundaries. Here all people seemed to me to live tranquilly in roomy houses
with pleasant yards or on near-by farms where there were fine horses and
fat blooded sheep, and where planting and harvesting went ahead year in
and year out in orderly fashion.
The chief and only industry of Poland was its seminary, now about thirty
years old. It was a community enterprise started in 1848 by Mr. B. F. Lee,
the financial agent who had hired me. Everybody in the village had
subscribed to its endowment, practically every church had at one time or
another been its patron. The long depression of the seventies had crippled
its finances sadly; but times were better now, and the well-to-do Presbytery
of Mahoning County had agreed to take it under its care. But I was soon to
learn that Poland Union Seminary in spite of the patronage of the
Presbytery lived on a narrow and worn shoestring. Moreover, I at once
divined, kind as were those who were responsible for my being there, that I
had been injected into a situation of which Mr. Lee had given me no hint
strong enough to penetrate my inexperience. It was serious enough, as on
the very day the school bell first rang for me the villagers began to let me
know. Men and women would stop me on the street to say:

“So it’s you that’s taking Miss Blakeley’s place. You have no idea how
badly we feel about her resigning. I went to school to her, my father and
mother went to school to her. I had hoped all my children would go to her.
She was a wonderful teacher, a beautiful character. You look pretty young;
you haven’t had much experience, have you?”
I was not long in learning that the devotion of the community to Miss
Blakeley was deserved. The village was right in honoring her, in mourning
her. It no doubt felt a certain satisfaction in letting me know at the start it in
no way regarded me as an adequate substitute. Its insistence was such that,
before the end of my first fortnight, I was ready to resign.
My morale would hardly have been so quickly shaken if I had not at once
discovered to my consternation that there was an important part of my
duties which was in danger of proving too much for me. The worst of it was
that it concerned the largest block of pupils in an institution where every
pupil counted, where Mr. Lee regarded it as of vital importance that every
pupil be given what he wanted. Here he advertised you could prepare for
college, here you could have special advanced work in anything you
wanted. And Mr. Lee was right if the seminary was to live as a cog in the
country’s educational wheel.
Somebody ought to write, perhaps somebody has written of the passing
of this once valuable institution. It came before the college and the high
school and for a time did the work of both; but when the high school began
to prepare students for the college and the colleges added preparatory
departments and at the same time offered special courses the seminary
slowly realized that it must either go out of business or combine with one or
another of its healthy growing rivals.
In a few places, as in Poland Village, the seminary was hanging on
tenaciously, trying to demonstrate that it was still a better man than these
new undertakings, these high schools, these colleges with their preparatory
schools.
The faculty which was to make the demonstration at Poland was made up
of three persons: in order of rank, the President, the Preceptress, her
assistant. The acting President insisted on all the perquisites of his title. His
chief duty he regarded as conducting the chapel with more or less
grandiloquent remarks. When my assistant and I complained of too much
work he would scowl and say that his executive duties made it impossible

for him to take on more classes. The result was that I started out with two
classes in each of four languages—Greek, Latin, French, and German, as
well as classes in geology, botany, geometry, trigonometry. In addition there
was my threatened Waterloo, the two largest classes in the school: one in
what was called “verb grammar,” the other, “percentage arithmetic”—so
named from the points in the textbooks where the term’s work began. From
time immemorial these two classes had been conducted in the interests of
the district schoolteachers of the territory. It was the custom for these
teachers to spend one term a year in the seminary, where, regardless of the
number of years they had been teaching, the number of times they had
treated themselves to a period of study, they always (so I was told) insisted
on their verb grammar and their percentage arithmetic. It was like a ritual.
As they were the numerical backbone of the institution, there was nothing
so important in the judgment of management as their satisfaction.
It was a killing schedule for one person, but I was so eager, so
ridiculously willing, so excited, and also so fresh from college that I did not
know it. Indeed, as I look back on it I think I did fairly well, all things
considered. I should have had no great alarm about my success if it had not
been for the grammar and the arithmetic. From the first day I realized I was
on ground there which, once familiar, was now almost unintelligible. I
could and did teach my geometry and “trig” with relish; I could and did
pilot fairly advanced classes in four languages so that the pupils at least
never discovered that in one of them I was far beyond my depth, and that in
all of them I at times knew myself to be skating on thin ice; but these
district schoolteachers, several of them older than I, were not to be deceived
or bluffed. They had had experience—I had not; and like the villagers of
Poland they proposed to make me realize that no college diploma could
make up for inexperience. Experience in “percentage arithmetic” and “verb
grammar” came from doing the same examples and diagraming and parsing
the same sentences year after year and going back to teach them in their
communities. Many of these examples were tricky. Many of the sentences
were ambiguous. They had learned solutions for both, solutions which had
the backing of tradition. I was soon terrified lest I be trapped, so scared I
would wake up in the night in cold sweats. This was my state of mind when
one day the most important man in the Village, Robert Walker, the local
banker, stopped me on the street.

“Sis,” he said—he was to always call me Sis—“Sis, you are following a
fine teacher.” I could have wept—the same old story. “But don’t worry,
what you must do is keep a stiff upper lip.”
“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said as I hurried on lest I cry in the street.
But that “keep a stiff upper lip,” coming from the man it did, restored me;
and I resolved, cost what it would, to find a way to master my district
schoolteachers. True, it took me two months to discover the weak place in
their armor. Finally I learned they were solving problems and parsing
sentences not according to principles but according to answers they had
learned. The reason they insisted on going over them year after year at the
seminary was to keep the solutions in their memory. I had no skill in
solving puzzles, but I did know something about the principles and
determined to try them on problems and sentences that were not in their
books or any books to which they had access.
And so one day, luckily for me before they had a chance to demonstrate
my incapacity as two or three of them I am confident were expecting to do,
I casually put on the board two or three rather tough examples from outside
arithmetics, two or three not simple sentences from grammars I felt sure
they had never seen. I always recall with satisfaction the perplexity with
which the two or three young men I most feared looked at what I had set for
them, their injured protest. “But those examples are not in our books.”
“What difference does that make? The only important thing is that you
know the principles. If you can’t apply them, why learn them?”
After a month of excursions into territory unfamiliar to them I had them
humbled and slowly grasping certain new ideas. I knew I was regarded with
respect. It was the one conquest in the two years I spent as the Preceptress
of the Poland Union Seminary of which I was proud.
Before these two years were up Mr. Lee must have realized he would
never get from me the help he needed in his ambition to preserve the school
as a seminary, that I would never become another Miss Blakeley. He wanted
some one ambitious to make teaching a life work. I was not. Teaching was a
mere stepping-stone in my plan of life, and at Poland Union Seminary it
had proved a slippery stone. From the time I bounded out of bed in the
morning—for in those days I did bound out of bed—until I dropped into it
at an early hour, dead tired, I had no time for my microscope. It had become
dusty on the table, but the passion for it and what it might reveal was still

strong in me. My confidence that I could save money to continue my
studies on five hundred dollars a year had proved illusory. I found myself
coming out short, obliged to borrow from my father. There came to be a
mutual, if unspoken, agreement between Mr. Lee and me that I should
resign. Neither of us was getting what he had hoped, and so at the end of
the second year, June, 1882, I gave up teaching as a stepping-stone.
So far as I could then see or did see for a long time, this first effort at an
independent self-directing life was an interlude which had no relation to
what I wanted at the time to do or what, as it turned out, I did do.
The most lasting impressions and experiences in this Poland interlude
had little or nothing to do with my work in the seminary. They came from
the friendships I formed while that work went on, centering in the family of
the understanding gentleman who had at the outset stopped me on the street
to say, “Keep a stiff upper lip.”
I was soon to realize that this shrewd bit of advice was instigated by his
daughter Clara, who was to become and who remains one of my dearest
friends. Indeed, it was due to her understanding and affection that my two
years in Poland, quite apart from the professional disappointment in them,
were the gayest, most interesting, and in many ways the happiest of my life
up to that time.
Clara Walker, or “Dot,” as high and low in and about Poland called her,
was a fine example of the out-of-door girl of the eighties, the girl who had
revolted against lacing, high heels, long skirts, and substituted for them an
admirable uniform of independence—tailor-made coat and skirt, high-neck
shirtwaist with four-in-hand tie, flat heels. This outfit suited Clara Walker’s
sturdy figure, her vigorous and free movement. Her eyes suited her
costume, for they were grey, direct, merry, looking unwaveringly on
everybody and everything.
Dot was close-mouthed, but when she sensed possible unfairness in a
situation which interested or concerned her she had her own wordless way
of dealing with it. It was she who realized the determination of the villagers
of Poland to make me feel that I never could fill Miss Blakeley’s place to
their satisfaction. She was loyal as they to the old teacher, but she wanted
me to have my chance and, the first week of school, announced herself my
champion by appearing at the door of the seminary as I was making my
weary way out at the end of the day.

“Wouldn’t you like to take a drive?” she said.
And there stood her smart turnout. What an escape from verb grammar
and percentage arithmetic and my growing inferiority complex! From that
time she never lagged in her determination to help me conquer my problem
by taking me away from it. She apparently took real pleasure in showing
me the country. Never a week that we did not go somewhere: Into town for
the theater—the first time I saw Mary Anderson, then the most beloved
actress as well as the most beautiful woman in the country, was in
Youngstown in “Pygmalion”; to big farms with great flocks of blooded
sheep and horses and ponies; to coal mines and iron mills; to little old
towns and run-down settlements skipped, like Poland, by the invasion of
industry.
Clara peopled all these various places with the unadorned realistic tales
of living and dead men and women. She had been born and had grown up in
Mahoning County. She had a widely scattered family connection, but most
important was her genuine interest in all human beings and theirs in her.
She was a perfect listener, never prying. People liked to talk to her; she
never forgot, related things, judged shrewdly and kindly, with the result that
she had in her mind a map of the human life of the country, quite as reliable
as a road map—a map in warm humorous colors.
Years later I realized that in those two years in Poland I had had under
my eyes a vivid picture of what happens to the farmer, his home, his town,
his children when industry invades his land.
This Mahoning country had been so rich, so apparently stable. The men
and women so loved what they and their forebears had done that they
yielded slowly to the coal miner and the mill man, but they were giving way
in the eighties. The furnace was in the back yard of the fine old houses with
their ample barns; and the shaft of the coal mine, in the richest meadows.
The effort to reconcile the two was making, but industry was conquering:
the destruction of beauty, the breaking down of standards of conduct, the
growth of the love of money for money’s sake, the grist of social problems
facing the countryside from the inflow of foreigners and the instability of
work—all this was written for him who could read. I could not read then,
but I gathered a few impressions which I realize now helped shape my
future interests and thinking.

It was on these long drives I first learned that not cities alone but all
communities have dregs, slums. Strange that it should be in such a place as
Poland, but here it was—a disreputable fringe where a group of men and
women had long been living together with or without marriage. You heard
strange tales of incest and lust, of complete moral and social
irresponsibility, and they were having a scandalously jolly time of it. Why I
was not more shocked, I do not know; probably because incest and lust
were almost unknown words to me in those days.
And there were indelible impressions of the industrial world. When we
drove into Youngstown, ten miles away, we passed between iron furnaces
lying along the Mahoning River. After the long depression of the seventies
they were again busy, and into the valley were coming hundreds and
hundreds of foreigners brought from Europe by the news that there was
once again work in the United States. It was in passing through the very
heart of this furnace district one night returning from the theater that I first
learned of the terrible dangers that lie in the smelting of ore. A furnace had
burst; men had been trapped by the molten metal, and their charred remains
were being carried across the road. Unforgettable horror.
And it was on one of these chance drives that I first saw what women can
do in moments of frenzied protest against situations which they cannot
control, first had my faith challenged in the universally peaceful nature of
my sex. I learned the meaning of Maenads, Furies, as we came upon a
maddened, threatening crowd rushing towards the offices of the mills which
had been shut down without warning. It was led by big robust shrieking
women, their hair flying, their clothes disheveled. It was a look into a world
of which I knew nothing, but like the charred bodies carried across the road
as I rode from the theater it was an unforgettable thing.
There were other introductions to the industrial world less horrifying. It
was while in Poland that I first went into a coal mine—a deep old-fashioned
coal mine, a subsidiary to a farm. Under some of these great farms with
their blooded sheep, their fine orchards and fields, their horses and ponies,
coal had been found. And it was being mined as a side line of the farm, a
new kind of crop. Near the head of the shaft were little houses for the
miners; and when dull times came and the mine was shut down the farmers
took on their care. There was a slaughter of an immense number of pigs, the

putting down of barrels of pork, the smoking of an incredible number of
hams, the making of sausages and headcheese.
“But why, why all this?” I asked.
“Oh,” said my hostess, “mining is unstable business. When there are long
shutdowns we must help the miners out, see that they have food.”
The intimacy with Dot Walker gave me a home. Mrs. Walker treated me
as a daughter, and as for Robert Walker, who still called me “Sis,” he liked
to have me around and to give me a word of wise counsel now and then. It
is because, in those months, I learned him to be as kindly, shrewd, honest,
simple-minded a man as I have ever known that I must interrupt my
narrative long enough to put in here the story of one of the cruelest episodes
of which I personally have known in the fifty years that I have been a more
or less understanding observer of our national political life. The story is of
Robert Walker and his one-time friend William McKinley, the twenty-fifth
President of the United States.
When I became an intimate of the Walker household a person I often
heard mentioned by its head was “the Major”—Major McKinley. Now it
was not in 1880 a name unfamiliar to me. I had met it already at Allegheny
College, where McKinley had once been a student. When the Civil War
broke out he had joined the exodus of students who volunteered at the first
call. He had come out of the war a major, studied law, and settled in Canton,
Ohio, only sixty or seventy miles from Poland and in the same
Congressional District. Here in 1876—the Mahoning district as it was
called—had sent him to Congress. It was a matter of interest in Allegheny
in my time to have one of its former students turn out a Congressman, its
usual crop being teachers, preachers, and missionaries.
When I came to Poland I learned quickly that McKinley had lived there
as a boy, had attended the seminary, and was their proudest example of “the
boy who had made good.” For four years he had been their Congressman.
How they boasted of him! How solidly they voted for him!
I was not long in the Walker household before I sensed something more
in Robert Walker than a citizen’s pride in McKinley. It was that species of
adoration a modest, honest-minded man often has for his leader—his leader
who can do no wrong. I realized this when I first saw them together. The
Major had come to our seminary commencement in June of 1881. I
remember nothing at all of the speech he made, but the scene on the wide

green in front of the village church after the exercises were over remains
vivid. Scattered about were scores upon scores of girls and women in the
frilly white gowns, the long white feather boas, the flower-trimmed hats, the
gay parasols of the period; and in and out wound the Major, shaking hands,
smiling, exchanging friendly greetings—all together at home, no back
slapping, no kissing of babies. It was all so gentle, so like a picture of an
English garden party where the politics are hidden beneath the finest of
social veneers. And there was Robert Walker almost effulgent.
“Well, Sis,” he asked me later, “what do you think of the Major?” A
remark to which he expected no answer. What answer other than his could
there be?
What I did not know then was that from the beginning of William
McKinley’s political career Robert Walker had been his chief—and for a
time, I think, his only—financial backer. Beginning with his first campaign
for Congress in 1875 Mr. Walker had advanced the Major $2,000 for
expenses. He continued equal advances before each successive campaign,
the understanding being that $1,000 a year was to be paid on the debt.
Along with this financial support went a staunch support of all the
Major’s political ideas. These ideas were those of the Republican party, and
for men like Robert Walker the party was hallowed. It was “the party of
Lincoln.” Loyalty to Lincoln required loyalty to all that was directly or
indirectly connected with him.
“Is Robert Lincoln a dude?” one of my Mahoning County acquaintances
asked me years later when I told him that I had been talking with Robert
Lincoln about his father.
“Is he a dude?”—by which he meant, as I took it, a kind of Ward
McAllister.
“No, no, not that,” I assured him.
“Well,” he said reflectively, “even if he was a dude I would vote for him
for President because he is Abraham Lincoln’s son.”
The chief test of loyalty to the party of Lincoln in Ohio was the degree of
support given to the high protective tariff. William McKinley’s support was
devout and unqualified. He looked on a duty so low that it allowed
importations as a species of treason. There was tin plate, for example.

The year that I went to Poland, 1880, McKinley first espoused a duty on
tin plate. There was strong opposition among iron and steel manufacturers.
They felt they already had all they could look after in Congress; but when
they told this to McKinley his answer was that unless they supported tin
plate he would not support their tariffs. Naturally they yielded, and tin plate
was added to their list of protégés. McKinley felt so sure of ultimate victory
for the duty that he evidently did not hesitate to advise his friends to get
ready for its coming. At all events he encouraged Robert Walker, suggested
to him in fact that he establish in Youngstown, Ohio, a stamping plant for
the making of tinware, taking with him as partner his brother-in-law
Andrew J. Duncan. As Andrew Duncan had no money to invest the Major
gave to Mr. Walker a sheaf of signed notes to be used whenever he had need
of money.
Now Robert Walker was not a manufacturer; he was a farmer and a good
one—a coal operator—the banker of the Village of Poland and the
surrounding country, but it was not in Robert Walker’s nature to refuse to
help the Major or his relatives in their ambitions, as he had already
frequently proved. Indeed, at that time he was backing McKinley’s brother
Abner in a business venture which was soon to fail with loss of all he had
put in. But Robert Walker’s faith in McKinley’s wisdom was such that he
could not conceive of failure in anything he advised.
The plant was started in 1890. There could not have been a more unlucky
moment to launch a new industry. The long depression of the nineties was
beginning. Iron and steel were already seriously affected. Money was tight.
Robert Walker found himself almost at once forced to use the Major’s
notes. He found only too soon that he had embarked on a hopeless
undertaking, and in February of 1893 the works were closed.
Now at that moment Mark Hanna and his colleagues on the National
Republican Committee were counting on William McKinley to win the
Presidential election for them in 1896. The announcement that he was
involved in the Walker failure to the tune of some one hundred thousand
dollars, more than the combined fortune of himself and wife, was a cruel
blow to their plan. McKinley was straightforward with them. He had signed
the notes; he must give up politics, go back to the law, and pay his honest
debts. But that could not be permitted. He was too important—one hundred
thousand dollars was a small sum compared to what the Republican

Committee expected from his election. The money was raised—not so
quietly. It became necessary to explain how McKinley had become
involved to this amount, and the explanation which McKinley’s political
friends put out was that he was a victim of “a man named Walker,” as Mark
Hanna’s able biographer, Herbert Croly, calls him—a man whom he had
trusted, and who had deceived him as to the amount of money he was
raising on his notes. That is, the Republican committee deliberately put on
Robert Walker the stigma of fraud, presented him to the public as a man
who had betrayed confidence, and William McKinley never denied their
presentation.
I have it from Robert Walker and from his daughter that no note of
William McKinley was ever cashed without consulting him, and I believe
them. Moreover, Andrew Duncan was in this enterprise and knew what was
going on. It is an interesting fact that when my friend Clara Walker, who
kept the accounts for the McKinleys and her father, went the morning after
the announcement of the failure to her office in Youngstown, all her books
had disappeared along with many papers which belonged to the firm.
I had been living abroad for two years when all this happened, but just
before I had left America I had talked with Robert Walker about his venture
—the money he was trying to raise on McKinley’s notes. His confidence
was untarnished.
“The Major knows, Sis. He will see this thing through. I’d do anything to
back him.”
And he did. When on my return I went to see my friends I found they had
given up practically everything, and Robert Walker himself was utterly
broken by the ignominy heaped on him.
I begged him to give me his side of the story, let me tell it, told him I
would never rest until I had an opportunity to put down what I knew of his
long support of the Major’s ambitions, what I believed of him as a man of
unselfish integrity. He absolutely and finally refused. “Nobody would ever
believe the Major could do anything wrong. I didn’t.”
But the Major had allowed the oldest and most loyal friend he had in his
public life to be ruined not only in fortune but in reputation. Now that
Robert Walker and Mrs. Walker are both gone and reviving the episode can
no longer give them pain, it gives me a certain solace to put down the story
as I believe it.

I was leaving Poland, but what was I to do? Today, with my passion for
the microscope still undimmed, I would naturally seek a place in one of the
many laboratories now open to women. Hundreds of women in the country
bent on scientific research are now in industrial, institutional, or
governmental laboratories, but in 1882 there was almost nothing of that
kind open to women. The change is due, first, to the tremendous advance in
scientific research; second, to the way women have proved their
adaptability to laboratory work. No doubt the great majority of them are,
like the majority of women in offices, laboratory wives, but we have
inspired workers among them; probably, all things considered, as large a
proportion as among men.
If things had been as they were in 1876, when I asked my father if he
could put me through college and he had so cheerfully and happily, I think,
agreed, I could have asked to be financed for higher studies. But things
were not as they had been, and it would have been quite out of the question
in 1882, when I decided that my first step towards economic independence
was mistaken, for him to finance me—the country was coming into a new
depression, that of ’83 and ’84, and the oil business was in a serious state
for those who produced the oil.
But my home was open, wide open. I think it was this fact that is at the
bottom of my strong conviction that the home is an essential link in the
security of men and women. After one has gone forth on his own there
frequently comes a time when he is shelterless as far as his own resources
go. To have a refuge of which he is sure is one of the most heartening and
stabilizing experiences in a life. If my Poland venture was a failure
professionally it did not throw me on the street; I had a place to go and
think it over. When I asked my mother if it would be all right for me to
come home, her answer was what it always was to be in the future when I
was obliged (more than once) to make the request: “Of course, that is your
right.” That is, my father and mother looked on the home they had created
not as something belonging only to them—a place they had for their
comfort and privacy, it was a place for all of those in the family procession
who had no other place to go. In turn I saw that home opened to
grandmother and grandfather, aunts and uncles, children and grandchildren,
quite regardless of the extra burden it put on their resources, limitations on
their space, the irritations and complications that are always bred by the
injection of extra persons, however beloved and close, into a settled group.

It was in June, 1882, that I went back home, dusted my desk in the Tower
room now shared with my sister’s playhouse and dolls—set up my
microscope and went to work on the Hydrozoa. But not for long.

5
A FRESH START—A SECOND RETREAT

It was the custom of the Tarbell household to do its part in entertaining
the Methodist ministers and presiding elders who periodically “filled the
pulpit” of our church. In the winter after my return from the Poland venture
we had a guest, an important local personage, Dr. Theodore L. Flood, a
preacher who had retired from active ministry to take the editorship of a
magazine called The Chautauquan, published in the town thirty miles from
Titusville where I had so recently spent four years—Meadville, the home of
Allegheny College.
On this visit Dr. Flood asked me to “help him out” for a month or two in
a new department in his magazine. I was quick to accept, glad to be useful,
for I had grown up with what was called the Chautauqua Movement.
Indeed, it had been almost as much a part of my life as the oil business, and
in its way it was as typically American. If we had a truer measure for values
we would count it more important.
This Chautauqua Movement had grown out of a Methodist camp meeting
held annually at Fair Point on the pleasant lake which in my childhood had
been the terminus of our most ambitious all-day excursions. The president
of this Association by 1870 was a man justly respected in all that part of the
world for his good deeds, as well as his business acumen—Lewis Miller, a
manufacturer of Akron, Ohio. Mr. Miller was to be known nationally as the
father-in-law of Thomas Edison, but old-time Chautauquans put it the other
way: “Edison is Lewis Miller’s son-in-law.” That was enough
recommendation for Edison in their minds.
Lewis Miller’s interest in Chautauqua went beyond the annual camp
meeting. He saw the opportunity to build up there a summer home where
parents could give their children healthy out-of-door amusement, protection

from the evil ways of the unregenerate, and sound modern instruction in the
Bible. Sympathy with this program induced a half-dozen families in the
Titusville Methodist Church to join in the purchase of a lot on the outskirts
of the grounds and start a Titusville settlement—a cottage with a mess hall
and a few rooms—tents serving as sleeping quarters for extras. Father
joined the colony soon after we moved to Titusville. We had a tent and a
flat-bottomed boat.
Through the years I have been recalling, the years in high school, college,
as Preceptress of Poland Union Seminary, part of all my summers had been
spent at Chautauqua. Lewis Miller’s laudable attempt to furnish attractive
instruction in the Bible meant little or nothing to me at first; the flat-
bottomed boat meant a great deal. But in 1874 something happened that
dragged me away from the water. Lewis Miller had persuaded the most
eminent advocate of the Sunday school in America, Dr. (afterwards Bishop)
John H. Vincent, to select Fair Point as the home of a National
Interdenominational Sunday School Institute which he and those who saw
with him had been for some time planning. The first session of this new
organization was held in 1874 under the name of the Chautauqua Assembly.
It was recognized at once as a revolution upsetting the old order.
The most spectacular feature of the revolution was the Chautauqua
platform, making as it did stirring, challenging contacts with current
intellectual life. There one heard the great speakers of the day on all sorts of
subjects. There fine concerts were given. It was the scientific lectures which
caught me, particularly those of Dr. R. Ogden Doremus of New York. His
platform experiments, in which two skillful women assisted, excited me as I
had never been before. But what aroused me most were certain
demonstrations with a magnificent microscope which they were giving in a
little building at one side. Nothing in the world seemed to matter to me so
much as to be able to talk with these women, to ask their advice about the
work I was beginning with the little instrument bought with my own
carefully saved money. Perhaps, oh, perhaps, I dreamed, they would let me
look through the great beauty they handled so deftly, focus it, watch the life
which went on in its field. So one day I hung around after the talk was over,
slipped up to them, steeled myself to tell them that I was going to be a
microscopist, begged them to give me a few lessons, advise me. The two
ladies smiled down from their height, so plainly showing they thought me a

country child with a queer behavior complex. “Quite impossible,” they said,
and turned back to their conference with Dr. Doremus.
Abashed, humiliated, but luckily too angry to cry I made my way back to
my flat-bottomed boat. I would show them, I resolved, clenching my fists!
It was years before I attempted again to get from a Chautauqua
undertaking more than it was offering to the public at large. There were
many of these undertakings. Dr. Vincent saw to that. A man better fitted by
experience, conviction, and personality to persuade a half-asleep, wholly
satisfied community to accept a new order could not have been found in the
America of the eighties. John Vincent was forty-two years old when he
came to Chautauqua—handsome, confident, alert, energetic, radiating well-
being. And he was an orator, and orating at Chautauqua made men tolerant
even of heresy. He went about his business of organizing the work of the
Assembly with a skill which commanded the admiration of everybody, even
those hostile to the secularization of their beloved camp meeting. As a
platform manager I never have known his equal. He had magnetism, but he
knew when and how to turn it on; he was shrewd, cunning, pungent. He
pricked bubbles, disciplined his audience. The Chautauqua audience came
to be one of the best behaved out-of-door audiences in the country. The fact
that we were out of doors had persuaded us that we were free to leave
meetings if we were bored or suddenly remembered that we had left bread
in the oven, or that the baby must have wakened. When the performance
had been stopped once or twice to “give that lady a chance to go out
without further disturbing the speaker” we learned to stay at home or to sit
out the lecture.
There is only one word to describe what Lewis Miller and Dr. Vincent
now did to Chautauqua, and that is “electrification.” The community was
made up mainly of hard-working men and women who wanted a vacation
in surroundings where they would not “have to worry about the children.”
Certainly if high fences with gates through which you could not pass in or
out after ten P.M.—never pass without your ticket, and not even with one on
Sundays—if watchful guards and ten o’clock curfew, if a mass public
opinion on the part of elders in support of these restrictions, could have
suppressed all the mischief and lawlessness in the youth which swarmed
Chautauqua, parents were right in sleeping tranquilly. As a matter of fact I
never knew of any serious offenses, though there probably were many

which I was still too much of a little girl to recognize. The worst mischief in
which I personally assisted was playing tag up and down the relief model of
Palestine, which skirted the lake as Palestine does the Mediterranean. It was
spotted with plaster-of-Paris models of towns from Damascus to Bethsaida.
I remember one rule of our game was that you could not be tagged if you
straddled Jerusalem. The most serious vandalism of which I knew and in
which I had no part was stealing Damascus or Nazareth or Tyre and
carrying it away bodily.
Dr. Vincent did not change the restrictions, but he made them more
endurable by the fresh interest he put into our lives. His effect on the
community physically was immediate. It began to grow. The sound of the
hammers nailing together the, for the most part, flimsy cottages was never
still. The result was very like what Mark Twain found in the summer colony
of Onteora in the Catskills in its first year—“the partitions so thin you can
hear the women changing their minds.”
Housekeeping improved. It had been as sketchy as the cottages—picnic
housekeeping. You saw them at it, out in the rear of their cottages, over an
old wood stove or stone fireplace, the men in their shirt sleeves, the women
in big aprons, if not wrappers. Planks on sawhorses for tables, mats (we had
not learned to say “doilies” yet), benches for seats. The natural practice of
bringing discarded furniture from home to furnish the cottages led to the
only distinctive piece of Chautauqua furniture I recall—a long high-backed
bench made from an old-fashioned four-post bedstead. There were few
garrets in all the country about Chautauqua that did not harbor one or more
such bedsteads. They had been hidden away when families could afford the
new-styled quartered-oak or walnut bedroom suites. Some ingenious mind
had seen that by shortening the sidepieces of a four-poster to seat width,
using the headboard for a back, you had a commodious and, with cushions,
a comfortable seat, even couch. They were scattered all over the place.
With the coming of Dr. Vincent, Chautauqua rapidly developed a
Promenade along the south end of the lake front. Cottages here were lathed
and plastered, had wicker chairs on their verandahs, and the residents soon
were taking their meals at the really stately Athenaeum Hotel. It was in this
front row that Dr. and Mrs. Vincent came to live in a tent, a tent de luxe
with a real house—so it looked to us—behind it.

Sometimes when we were properly dressed and shod we walked past the
hotel and the cottages housing our aristocrats, and if by chance we saw Dr.
or Mrs. Vincent or, best of all, the “Vincents’ little boy”—George, we later
learned his name to be—why, then we boasted of it at the supper table as
one might say today, “I saw President Roosevelt, Mrs. Roosevelt, Sistie,
Buzzie.”
Dr. Vincent kept the place on its toes not only by the steady improvement
of its platform, its amusements, in the quality of the people who came to
teach and preach, but by a steady flow of new undertakings. He planned
incessantly to stir not only our souls but our minds. We came to expect new
ideas at each successive session and were never disappointed if sometimes a
little bewildered. Behind all these various undertakings was the steadying
hand of Lewis Miller, the silent partner, who had begun by spying out the
land, establishing a community, laying the foundations for the Institution as
it exists today—a center of democratic, Christian culture.
Dr. Vincent’s masterpiece, as I always thought, came in 1878 when he
laid before his Chautauquans a plan which had been long simmering in his
never quiet mind. He did this in the finest of what we call inspirational talks
that I ever heard—at least it stirred me so deeply that I have never forgotten
the face of the orator nor, more important, the upturned faces of his hearers.
He announced a scheme for a four-year course of home reading under the
direction of the Chautauqua management adapted to men and women who
had missed a college education, but who felt a deep desire for knowledge
and were willing to adopt any practical plan which would give them a
college outlook. It was to be called the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific
Circle.
Now this does not sound exciting; but as a matter of fact it was deeply
exciting, for the speaker was pouring out his heart. He had never had a
college education; he had never ceased to feel the lack of what he believed
it would have given him. He had struggled to make up for his loss by
persistent, systematic daily reading and study. Establishing the habit as a
boy, he had never abandoned it. It had given him deep satisfaction,
supplied, he thought, the college outlook. He believed there were thousands
of men and women in the United States, scores, possibly hundreds, in his
audience, who had been forced, as he had been, to sacrifice their early
ambitions for education. They had hidden the hunger in their hearts where

at times it still gnawed. He was offering them the same help he had found,
and confidently, glowingly, he outlined the course of home reading which
Dr. John H. Finley has so aptly named the American Adult Education
Pioneer.
The uplifted faces all about me told the story, particularly the faces of the
women of thirty or more. Women of that generation had had their natural
desire for knowledge intensified by the Woman’s Rights movement, in
which the strongest plank had been a demand for the opportunity for higher
education. These women were now beyond the day when they could go to
college, but here was something which they saw intuitively was practical.
The immediacy of their response was in a degree accounted for by their
devotion to Dr. Vincent. I suppose most of the women who frequented
Chautauqua were more or less in love with him, the worship a man of
overflowing sentiment receives from the benches, but most of his audience
would have preferred to die rather than reveal their secret passion.
Well, it was a great emotional experience with large and immediate
practical results, for, before the summer session was over, eight thousand
people had joined the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle.
They had joined, and they were buying the books chosen. The most
important volume in that first year’s course was Green’s “Short History of
the English People”—in my judgment the most important book save one
that the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle ever included, that
exception being W. C. Brownell’s “French Traits.” The sudden demand for
so large and expensive a volume as Green’s History, outside of regular trade
channels, followed as it was by spectacular sales of other books from which
neither publisher nor writer had expected anything out of the normal, set the
whole publishing world agog, and naturally raised the question, “How are
we to get in on this new market?”
There were many approaches, all legitimate enough so far as I know. I
found a rather amusing proof of one not long ago in Marjorie Wiggin
Prescott’s fine collection of manuscripts and rare books—a volume of Lew
Wallace’s “Ben Hur” enriched by a letter to the publisher, signed by Mrs.
Wallace and dated November 24, 1884. The letter, which is self-
explanatory, is reproduced here with Mrs. Prescott’s permission.
Crawfordsville, Nov. 24, 1884.

Dear Sir

Because of inquiries of correspondents as to the number of wives Gen. Wallace has had, I have
thought best to instruct you to add to the dedication of Ben-Hur, making it:
To
The Wife of My Youth
who still abides with me
This with Gen. Wallace’s consent.
Several literary clubs have made it a handbook for study in connection with Roman History. If by
some means you could have it adopted by the Chautauqua Club, which numbers twenty thousand
members, it might be worth while to try. Pardon the suggestion.
May I ask you to furnish me a report of the sales of Ben-Hur, year by year, from the beginning?
With high regard,
Very truly yours
Susan E. Wallace.

As the Chautauqua Literary and Scientific Circle grew, there came
increasing necessity of a steady sympathetic administration. To help in this
task it was decided in 1880 to establish a monthly organ—The
Chautauquan, it was to be called—in which portions of the required
readings could be published more cheaply than in book form, and through
which by counsel and suggestions the leaders could keep in closer touch
with the readers—better meet their needs. Dr. Vincent was quick to sense
weak places in the organization, and ingenious in devising ways to take care
of them. It was to try out one of his devices that Dr. Flood was now asking
my temporary help.
Here was the situation that had been uncovered—hundreds of those who
had joined the great circle and bought its books were without dictionaries,
encyclopaedias, explanatory helps of any kind, and they lived too far away
—on the Plains, in the mountains, on distant farms—to reach libraries.
Headquarters were inundated with questions: How do you pronounce this
word, translate this phrase? Who was this man, this woman? What does this
or that mean?
“Could not The Chautauquan take care of this difficulty,” suggested Dr.
Vincent, “by annotating the portions of the various texts to be read in that
particular month? Let some one try it out.”
As I happened to be the “some one” within reach when Dr. Flood
received the suggestion, the attempt was put up to me—temporary trial, I
was made to understand. Now I had known from childhood homes and
towns where there were practically no books beyond the Bible and the
children’s spellers. As books had always come after bread in our household

I naturally pitied those who did not have them; so I undertook the notes
with the determination to make them as helpful as I could.
To my surprise and delight Dr. Vincent sent word to me that I had caught
his idea, and that he had advised Dr. Flood to ask me to prepare similar
notes each month.
“Will you do it?” asked Dr. Flood.
I jumped at the chance, calculating that it would take not over two weeks
of my month, give me pin money, and leave time for the microscope—that
my future was in it, I did not dream.
But my task required better equipped libraries than Titusville offered;
Meadville, only thirty miles away, headquarters for The Chautauquan, had
them, and so I arranged to do my work there, remaining until I had read the
proofs—an exacting job which never ceased to worry me. What if the
accent was in the wrong place? What if I brought somebody into the world
in the wrong year? Something of the kind happened occasionally, and when
it did I quickly discovered that, while there might be many Chautauqua
readers who did not have books of reference, there were more that did and
knew how to use them.
Once in touch with the office of The Chautauquan I began to see things
to do. Dr. Flood had little interest in detail. The magazine was made up in a
casual, and to my mind a disorderly, fashion. I could not keep my fingers
off. A woman is a natural executive: that has been her business through the
ages. Intuitively she picks up, sets to rights, establishes order. I began at
once to exercise my inheritance, proved useful, was offered a full-time job,
and threw myself heartily into an attempt to learn how to make up a
magazine in the way I suspected a magazine should be made up.
When the long-suffering foreman of the printing office discovered I was
in earnest he undertook my education, taught me the vocabulary—the only
galley I had heard of up to that time was a war vessel of the Middle Ages—
suggested dummies, and offered a model. He installed a proper respect for
the dates on which copy was to be in, and forms closed: showed me the
importance of clean copy by compelling me to see with my own eyes the
time it took to make a correction, trained me until I could stand over the
closing of the last form and direct the necessary changes to be made in
order to make room for a three-line advertisement which had just arrived,
and which, such was the need of The Chautauquan for advertising, must

under no consideration be thrown out. When I could do that nonchalantly I
felt as if I had arrived. And this training I owed to as fine a craftsman as
there was in the trade at the time; as well, he was a courteous and patient
gentleman—Adrian McCoy, long the head of the pressroom where The
Chautauquan was printed.
My willingness to take on loose ends soon brought to my desk much of
the routine office correspondence—letters to be answered by a more or less
set form, signed with Dr. Flood’s name and mailed without troubling him to
read them.
In this grist were many letters from readers, women chiefly, who laid
their troubles and hopes on our shoulders, confident of understanding and
counsel. Dr. Flood’s answers to such communications were courteous but
formal. Probably he appreciated as I did not that there lay safety. I felt
strongly that such an appeal or confidence should have a personal,
sympathetic letter, and I began producing them, pouring out counsel and
pity. I shudder now to think of the ignorant sentiment I probably spilled.
But my career as a professional counselor was checked suddenly by the
unexpected result of a series of letters to a contributor. This gentleman, a
foreign lecturer and teacher, had been chilled by the lack of understanding
by Americans of his ideals. And all of this he was expressing in letters to
the office after our acceptance of one or two of his articles. I was deeply
touched by his outpourings and answered in kind—of course signing my
editor’s name. Then one day Dr. Flood received a letter saying that on such
a day the gentleman would be in Meadville. He must see the one who so
understood him. And come he did. Poor Dr. Flood did not know what it was
all about.
“But these letters,” the visitor exclaimed. “Oh,” Dr. Flood said, “Miss
Tarbell wrote those. We’ll speak to her.”
And so he was presented—letters in hand—Dr. Flood looking sternly at
me and leaving me to my fate.
“Did you write these letters?” the bewildered and disappointed stranger
asked.
All I could say was, “Yes, I wrote them.”
“And Dr. Flood never saw them?”
“No,” I said, “he never does.”

“I might have known it was a woman,” he groaned, and fled. And that
was the last we ever saw or heard of him. But it made a vast difference in
my editorial correspondence.
I was not satisfied, however, with setting things to rights and counseling
the unhappy. Having convinced my editor-in-chief that I could keep his
house in better order than he had been interested in doing, I became
ambitious to contribute to its furnishing, to extend its field beyond matters
purely Chautauquan. I began by offering contributions to what was called
the Editor’s Table—the Editor’s Note Book. I began to write articles, even
went off on trips to gather information on subjects which seemed to me to
be fitting.
The first and most ambitious of these undertakings was an investigation
made in the Patent Office in Washington of the amount of inventing the
records showed women to have done. I had been disturbed for some time by
what seemed to me the calculated belittling of the past achievements of
women by many active in the campaign for suffrage. They agreed with their
opponents that women had shown little or no creative power. That, they
argued, was because man had purposely and jealously excluded her from
his field of action. The argument was intended, of course, to arouse
women’s indignation, stir them to action. It seemed to me rather to throw
doubt on her creative capacity. Power to create breaks all barriers. Women
had demonstrated this, I believed, again and again while carrying on what I
as an observer of society was coming to regard as the most delicate,
complex, and essential of all creative tasks—the making of a home. There
was the field of invention. At the moment it was being said in print and on
the platform that, in all the history of the Patent Office, women had taken
out only some three hundred patents.
I had seen so much of woman’s ingenuity on the farm and in the kitchen
that I questioned the figures; and so I went to see, feeling very important if
scared at my rashness in daring to penetrate a Government department and
interview its head. I was able to put my finger at once on over two thousand
patents, enough to convince me that, man-made world or not, if a woman
had a good idea and the gumption to seek a patent she had the same chance
as a man to get one. This was confirmed by correspondence with two or
three women who at the time were taking out patents regularly.

These dashes into journalism, timid and factual as were the results, gave
my position more and more body, began slowly to arouse my rudimentary
capacity for self-expression. At the same time my position was enriched by
a novel feature of our undertaking, one that any editor of a monthly journal
can appreciate. We published but ten issues, suspending in July and August
in order to get out on the grounds at Chautauqua an eight-page newspaper
—the Chautauqua Assembly Daily Herald. This meant moving our
Meadville staff bodily to the Lake late in June.
I was soon contributing two columns of editorials a day to the Herald,
comments on the daily doings of the Assembly, and making many
stimulating acquaintances in doing it. Among them I valued particularly Dr.
Herbert B. Adams and Dr. Richard T. Ely of Johns Hopkins University, men
who were stirring youth and shocking the elders by liberal interpretations of
history and economics. We felt rather proud of ourselves at Chautauqua that
we were liberal enough to engage Dr. Adams and Dr. Ely as regular
lecturers and teachers, and that our constituency accepted them, if with
occasional misgivings.
It was not only the faculty of Johns Hopkins which was adding to my
friends. One who remains today among those I most value came from its
student body—Dr. John H. Finley. Dr. Finley gave several summers to the
Assembly Herald, reading its copy and its proofs among other things. It
was he who read my two columns and, no doubt, kept me out of much
trouble; but once there did slip by him a misquotation over which he still
chuckles when we talk of Chautauqua days. I made it a practice to head my
first column with a digest of the day’s happenings—a line to an event and,
as a starter for the paragraph, a quotation. I had been rather pleased one day
to select a line from James Thomson:

Office staff of The
Chautauquan, 1888: Miss
Tarbell at left, sitting

The meek-eyed Morn appears, mother of dews.

A copy of the paper was always thrown on the verandah of my upstairs
room around five o’clock in the morning, and I hopped out of bed to see
what had happened to my column. That morning something dire had
happened, for my quotation ran:
The weak-eyed Worm appears, mother of dews.

Eminence came from across the water annually and gave color and
importance, so we thought, to our doings. A foreign visitor with whom I had
a pleasant acquaintance running over some years was Dr. J. P. Mahaffy of
the University of Dublin. Dr. Mahaffy had contributed a series of delightful
articles to the required readings in The Chautauquan—“Gossip About
Greece”—and in the summer of 1889 he came over for two or three courses
of lectures at the Assembly. A distinguished figure, he was, and such a
contrast in his tweeds, his free movements, his spirited wide-ranging talk to
most of us.
My acquaintance grew out of our mutual interest in the flora of any spot
where we happened to be. One day as I came in from a botanizing
expedition outside the grounds carrying stocks of the lovely field lilies
common in the region, Dr. Mahaffy seized my arm: “You care for flowers
and plants? I thought American women had no interest in them.” A libel I

quickly hooted. In defense of my sisterhood I went diligently to work to
show him our summer flora. But he cared for nothing as much as our
summer lilies, begged me after the flowering was over to send him bulbs,
which I proudly did. In exchange I received from his Dublin garden seeds
of a white poppy which, he wrote me, he had originally gathered in the
shadow of the statue of Memnon in Egypt. Those poppies have always gone
with me; they flourished in my mother’s garden in Titusville—now they
flourish in my Connecticut garden.
My life was busy, varied, unfolding pleasantly in many ways, but it also
after six years was increasingly unsatisfactory, so unsatisfactory that I was
secretly, very secretly, meditating a change.
I was scared by what The Chautauquan seemed to be doing to the plan I
had worked out for the development of my mind. I had grown up with a
stout determination to follow one course of study to the end, to develop a
specialty. The work I was doing demanded a scattering of mind which I
began to fear would unfit me for ever thinking anything through. I realized
that an editor of value must have made up his mind about more things than
had I, feel himself ready to fight for those things if necessary. I had no
program in which The Chautauquan was interested. Moreover, I did not
want to be an editor.
But to break with The Chautauquan meant sacrificing security. I had
always had a vision of myself settled somewhere in a secure corner, simple,
not too large. I never had wanted things; I always had a dislike of
impedimenta, but I wanted something cheerful and warm and enduring.
There I could work over that which interested me, day in and day out, with
no alarm for my keep. Now The Chautauquan was a secure berth; so far as
I could figure, it would last through my time at least. To give it up meant
complete economic insecurity. I probably should not have been willing to
sacrifice what I think I had honestly earned if there had not been growing
upon me a conviction of the sterility of security. All about me were people
who at least believed themselves materially secure. They lived comfortably
within their means, they were busy keeping things as they were, preserving
what they had. They were the most respectable people in town, but secretly
I was beginning to suspect their respectability.
One day, listening to a fine elderly Scotch Presbyterian minister who had
in his congregation a large group of these stable, secure, best citizens, I was

startled when he leaned over his pulpit and, shaking his fist at us, shouted,
“You’re dyin’ of respectability.” Was that what was happening to me? I saw
with increasing clearness that I could not go beyond a certain point on The
Chautauquan, mentally, socially, spiritually. If I remained, it was to accept a
variety of limitations, and my whole nature was against the acceptance of
limitations. It was contrary to the nature of things as I saw them; to be
happy, I must go on with fresh attempts, fresh adventuring. The thing that
frightened me earlier in my youth came to the top now: that thing that made
me determine I would never marry because it meant giving up freedom, was
a trap. It was clear enough that I was trapped—comfortably, most
pleasantly, most securely, but trapped.
As time went on I realized that this security to which people so clung
could not always be counted on. They might think so, but had I not seen
beautiful homes sold under the hammer in Titusville, homes of those whom
the town had looked on as impregnable financially? In my years on The
Chautauquan in Meadville I had been a shocked observer of one of the
many dramatic political failures of the eighties, the defeat of the Republican
candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania at a critical moment—a Meadville
banker, Wallace Delamater. I was too much of a mugwump to sympathize
with the Republican platform, but I liked Wallace Delamater. I believed
him, as I think the records show, to be a tool of a past master of machine
politics—Matthew Quay. Taken up by Quay, the resources of the Delamater
bank and of allied banks in Meadville at the call of his party, he made a
campaign which was called brilliant. There was no doubt of the result in
Meadville.
I went to bed early, the night of the election, expecting to be aroused by
the ringing of bells, the blowing of whistles, for there was to be a
celebration. When I awakened with a start it was broad daylight. Had I slept
through the celebration? A sense of doom hung over me; I dressed
hurriedly, went down to get the paper. Wallace Delamater was defeated.
Promptly the Delamater bank closed and, one after another, four banks of
the town followed. There was a heavy run on the one remaining, the one
where I had my little deposit. The panic in the town was desperate;
everything was going. I don’t think I have ever been more ashamed of
anything in my life connected with money than I was when I took my bank
book and went to my bank to ask for my deposit. It was all the money I had

in the world—times were bad. But I have always continued to be a little
ashamed that I yielded to the panic, the more because my bank didn’t fail!
No, the security men flattered themselves they had achieved was never
certain. Moreover, my security was costing more in certain precious things
than I was willing to pay. Take the matter of making something
professionally sound, useful, justifiable, out of myself, which is the only
one of these “precious things” that I am talking about! I could do no more
towards it where I was. To begin with, I at last knew what I wanted to do. It
was no longer to seek truth with a microscope. My early absorption in rocks
and plants had veered to as intense an interest in human beings. I was
feeling the same passion to understand men and women, the same eagerness
to collect and to classify information about them. I find the proofs of this
slow and unconscious change of allegiance in an accumulation of tattered
notebooks tucked away for years, forgotten and only brought out after I had
set myself this curious task of tracing the road I have traveled through my
eighty years, trying to find out why I did this thing and not that, getting
acquainted with my own working life.
I seem to have begun to enter observations on human beings soon after I
had settled down to learn how to put a magazine together in an orderly
fashion. I applied the same method that I had used for so many years in
collecting and classifying natural objects which excited my curiosity. Take
leaves, on which I was always keen. I started out in high school to collect
them from all the flora in my territory, classifying them by shapes, veins,
stalks, color. Rarely do I take up a family book of those early years that
there do not fall out from between the pages leaves of one thing or another
that I had pressed to help me carry on my scheme of classification. I suspect
that I did not get much beyond a glib naming of parts.
Something analogous happened when I recognized that men and women
were as well worth notes as leaves, that there was a science of society as
well as of botany.
What had happened was undoubtedly that the tumults, the challenges of
my day had finally penetrated my aloofness, and that I was feeling more
and more the need of taking a part in them. The decade I spent in Poland
and on The Chautauquan had a background not so unlike that of the present
decade. At its beginning we were only fifteen years from a civil war which
had left behind not only a vast devastated region with the problem of its

reconstruction, but the problem of a newly freed people. It had left
bitterness which in intensity and endurance no war but a civil war ever
leaves. We had had our inflation, a devastating boom followed by seven
years of depression, outbreaks of all the various forms of radical philosophy
the world then knew. Youth talks glibly of communism today as if it had
just appeared in the country; but Marxian Communists transferred the
headquarters of the International to New York City in the seventies. More
conspicuous than the Communists were the Anarchists. Every city in the
United States had its little group, preaching and every now and then
practicing direct action. Indeed, they were a factor in all the violent labor
disturbances of the period.
In 1879 prosperity had come back with a whoop, and, as she usually does
after a long absence, had quickly exhausted herself by fantastic economic
excesses. By the time I undertook to annotate the Chautauqua Literary and
Scientific Circle’s readings the country had begun to suffer again from its
wanton speculation and reckless overbuilding of railroads. Factories and
mines and mills shut down; and when work stopped disorder began,
particularly on the railroads of the Southwest, the awful massacre of
Chinese in Wyoming—more awful, the Haymarket riot in Chicago followed
as it was by the execution of four men, all counselors of violence to be sure,
but no one of them found guilty either of making or of throwing the bomb.
The eighties dripped with blood, and men struggled to get at causes, to
find corrections, to humanize and socialize the country; for then as now
there were those who dreamed of a good world although at times it seemed
to them to be going mad.
The Chautauquan interested itself in all of this turbulent and confused
life. Indeed, it rapidly became my particular editorial concern. We noted
and discussed practically every item of the social program which has been
so steadily developing in the last fifty years, the items which have
crystallized into the Square Deal, the New Freedom, the New Deal.
The present argument for high wages, we made in the eighties. We called
it “the new economic coefficient in our industrial life.” “It is the well-paid
workman,” said The Chautauquan, “who is a relatively large consumer. We
are built upon a foundation of which this well-paid workman is an
important part.”

As for hours and conditions, we were ardent supporters of the eight-hour
day, organized labor’s chief aim in the eighties, and we were for contracts
between labor and capital, each being held responsible for his side of the
bargain. We were for education, arbitration, legislation, the program of the
Knights of Labor rather than the program of force which the growing
American Federation of Labor was adopting. We discussed interminably the
growing problem of the slums, were particularly strong for cooperative
housing, laundries and bakeshops; we supported the popular Town and
Country Club, seeking to keep a healthy balance between the two; we were
advocates of temperance but shied at prohibition—largely, I think, because
it had become a political issue, and we did not like to see our idealists going
into politics, as Bellamy and Henry George and the leaders of many causes
were doing.
That is, in the decade of the eighties we were discussing and thinking
about the same fundamentals that we are today.
My realization of the stress of the period began at home. Titusville and
all the Oil Region of Pennsylvania were struggling to loosen the hold of the
mighty monopoly which, since its first attack on the business in 1872, had
grown in power and extent until it owned and controlled over 90 per cent of
the oil industry outside of the production of the raw crude. The region was
divided into two hostile camps—the Independent Producers and Refiners,
and the Standard Oil Company. Their maneuvers and strategy kept town
and country in a constant state of excitement, of suspicion, of hope, and of
despair.
There was a steady weakening of independent ranks both by the men
worn out or ruined by the struggle, and those who saw peace and security
for themselves only in settling and gave up the fight.
In those days I looked with more contempt on the man who had gone
over to the Standard than on the one who had been in jail. I felt pity for the
latter man, but none for the deserters from the ranks of the fighting
independents. Those were the days when the freeing of transportation, the
privilege which had more to do with the making of the monopoly than
anything else, more even than the great ability of its management, was the
aim of all reformers. For years the Independents had worked for an
interstate commerce law which would make rate discrimination a crime. To
me such a law had come to have a kind of sanctity. It was the new freedom,

and when it was passed in 1887 I felt an uplift such as nothing in public life,
unless I except Mr. Cleveland’s tariff message of the year before, had ever
given me.
But it was not the economic feature of the struggle in the Oil Region
which deeply disturbed or interested me. It was what it was doing to people
themselves, to the people I knew, to my father and mother and their friends.
It was the divided town, the suspicion and greed and bitterness and defeats
and surrenders. Here was a product meant to be a blessing to men—so I
believed; and it was proving a curse to the very ones who had discovered it,
developed it.
I began to fill pages with notes of things seen and heard, and finally I
decided I should write a novel about it. Very secretly indeed, I went at it,
assembling a cast, outlining a plot, writing two or three chapters. Poor stuff.
Luckily I soon found out I was beyond my depth and gave it up.
From my notebooks I judge that I abandoned my novel the more readily
because I had conceived what I called “a more fundamental research”! This
was nothing less than a Science of Society to be illustrated by my own
observations on men and women. Looking over it now, I see that the
framework came from reading the voluminous discussions of the nature of
society then flooding the public. I took my framework where I found it, but
I filled it in with observations, gathered on all sides, of people I knew, heard
about, particularly read about in the newspaper.
But this ambitious work soon met the same fate as the novel. It broke off
at the end of the third chapter because I had concluded I could not construct
society as it was until I knew more about woman. I suspected she had
played a larger part in shaping society than she realized or perhaps was
willing to admit. I was questioning the argument that this is entirely a man-
made world. I had found too many woman-made parts in it to accept the
characterization at its face value. My science of society would not be
honest, I concluded, if the only part woman was allowed to play in it was
that of doormat, toy, and tool. I was troubled, too, by the argument that
women must be given suffrage if society was to be improved. Man had
made a mess of the world, I was told; woman must take his tools and
straighten things up. I did not feel the confidence of my courageous friends.
“Why should we expect them to do better with the vote than men have
done?” I asked. “Because they are women,” I was told. But they were

human beings, like men, and they were human beings with no experience of
the tools they wanted to use; and I had enough sense of the past to believe
that experience counted, and that it would be wise for all men and women
to consult it when they tried new ventures.
There had been women in public life in the past. What had they done? I
had to satisfy myself before I went further with my science of society or
joined the suffragists. It was humiliating not to be able to make up my mind
quickly about the matter, as most of the women I knew did. What was the
matter with me, I asked myself, that I could not be quickly sure? Why must
I persist in the slow, tiresome practice of knowing more about things before
I had an opinion? Suppose everybody did that. What chance for intuition,
vision, emotion, action?
My notebooks show that I began my plodding by making out a list of
women who seemed to offer food for reflection. The group that excited me
most were the women of the French Revolution. I made little studies of
several, wrote little pieces about them, and these little pieces I submitted to
the editor of The Chautauquan; he published several of them—a study of
Madame de Staël, of Marie Antoinette, of Madame Roland. But soon I
became heartily ashamed of my sketches, written as they were from so
meager an equipment. I felt this particularly about Madame Roland. I made
up my mind that I was going to know more about this woman, that she
probably would teach me what sort of contribution might be expected from
a woman in public life.
That meant research. How was I to carry it on? Whatever studying I did
depended on my ability to support myself while doing it; whatever studying
I did while on The Chautauquan must be turned into something available
for the magazine. My time and strength belonged to it. Obviously, I could
not do sufficient research and continue my position; it was as impossible as
it had been to act as preceptress of the Poland Union Seminary and at the
same time carry on my study with the microscope. Where was I to carry on
this research? There was but one place—Paris. And how was I to finance
myself in Paris—a strange country and a strange tongue—long enough to
write a book? I did not consider the possibility of getting a regular job: I did
not want one. I wanted freedom, and I had an idea that there was no
freedom in belonging to things, no freedom in security. It took time to
convince myself that I dared go on my own. But finally I succeeded.

Coming to a decision has a loosening, tonic effect on a mind which has
been floundering in uncertainty. Liberated, it rushes gaily, hopefully, to the
charting of a new course. I had no sooner resolved to strike out on my own
than my mind was bubbling with plans. I forgot that I was thirty-three years
old and, according to the code of my time and my society, too old for new
ventures; I forgot that outside of my very limited experience on The
Chautauquan I knew nothing of the writing and publishing world, had
literally no acquaintance among editors; I forgot that I was afraid of people,
believed them all so much greater and more important than they often
turned out to be that it cost me nervous chills to venture with a request into
a stranger’s presence.
Dismissing all these real handicaps, I plunged gaily into planning for a
career in journalism, self-directed, free-lance journalism. Surely I could
find subjects enough in Paris to write about, subjects that would interest
American newspapers. We were in the thick of a great agitation over the
condition and the conduct of American cities. The Chautauquan had
touched it occasionally. How did Paris keep house? I planned a syndicate of
my own which would answer all questions. Out of my newspaper work
might not articles grow for magazines? I thought so, and books, beginning
of course with my study of Madame Roland. So long as I told nobody about
my plans, they worked beautifully, carried me upward and onward into a
new and happier, more profitable, more satisfying world. But when I
announced my decision, laid out what I proposed to do, all the glow and
confidence went out of me, all the weaknesses in my venture came again to
the top. There were friends who said none too politely: “Remember you are
past thirty. Women don’t make new places for themselves after thirty.”
There were friends who resented my decision as a reflection on themselves.
A woman whose friendship I valued said bluntly: “You are one of us. Aren’t
we good enough for you?” My act was treason in her eyes. The whole force
of the respectable circles to which I belonged, that respectable circle which
knew as I did not the value of security won, the slender chance of replacing
it if lost or abandoned, was against me and so out of friendliness.
When I told my editor-in-chief I was leaving, going to Paris to study, he
was shocked. “How will you support yourself?” he asked, really anxious,
knowing that I must depend on my own efforts.
“By writing,” I said.

“You’re not a writer,” he said. “You’ll starve.”
He had touched the weakest point in my venture: I was not a writer, and I
knew it. I knew I never should be one in the high sense which I then and
still more now give to that word. I had neither the endowment nor the
passion nor the ambition to be a writer. I was rather a student, wanting to
understand things quite regardless of how I could use that understanding if I
reached it. There was much selfishness in my wanting to know for the sake
of knowing, much of a dead scholar in me; and that dead scholar has always
hung, more or less a weight, about my neck.
But if I was not a writer I had certain qualifications for the practice of the
modest kind of journalism on which I had decided. I counted no little on my
habit of planning in advance what I was going to do, and I had a strong
conviction that a plan of my own was worth more than any plan which was
made for me. Again, if I could not write, I did have a certain sense of what
mattered in a subject and a strong conviction that it was my sense of what
mattered, and not somebody else’s, that would give my work freshness and
strength if it was to have any.
Then there was my habit of steady, painstaking work—that ought to
count for something. And perhaps I could learn to write. If I were to do so,
could I do better than soak myself in French prose? I had read French
steadily from my school days; I had done not a little translating of articles
from the big reviews for The Chautauquan. If I could live with the
language, might I not master something of what seemed to me its essential
qualities, those which gave it both body and charm? These qualities were
the soundness of structure, the way it held together, and the beautiful clarity
of expression. At least I could try for them.
But when I tried to explain all this to my critical friends they continued
frankly skeptical, indignant. It was my father and mother who backed me
up, though I think they were both puzzled and fearful. “I don’t know what
you can do, Ida,” my father said, “that’s for you. If you think you can do it,
try it.” But in the end it took all the grit I had to go ahead.
Breaking up established relations is not easy. You begin by pulling up
deeply rooted things, rooted in your heart; you abandon once cherished
purposes. When I left The Chautauquan I was no longer the eager and
confident young woman who ten years before had started out for herself in
Poland, Ohio; I was ten years older, and I was keenly conscious that I had

in those ten years accumulated a fairly complete collection of shattered
idols. That I could forget them as quickly and as completely as I did, I owe
to the Paris of the nineties. I had scarcely passed her gates before I had
fallen under her spell. At once I was experiencing all the amazing
rejuvenation that comes from falling in love, whatever the object. It was not
to be “See Paris and die,” as more than one friend had jeered. I knew with
certainty it was to be “See Paris and live.”

6
I FALL IN LOVE

Falling in love with Paris at first sight—a coup de feu, it was—in no way
dimmed the energy and the care with which on the day of my arrival I
began to put into operation the cautious and laborious Plan for self-support
I had brought along. It rather intensified it. As I must begin at the bottom to
build up contacts with strangers on the other side of the ocean, and as there
was but $150 in my pocket, there was no time to waste.
In the ten years I had been trying to support myself I had learned that the
art of spending money is quite as important in a sound financial program as
the art of earning it. I had been going on the theory, as I still am—practice
is another story—that what I earned must cover my expenses and leave a
surplus for emergencies and expansion. I had applied my principles to my
small salary on The Chautauquan—never over $100 a month—well enough
to get myself to Paris and have this little reserve to care for myself while I
was proving or disproving that I could convince a few American editors
whom I had never seen that my goods were worth buying.
The first step, obviously, in carrying out my program was cheap living.
Luckily for me, two of my associates on The Chautauquan, excited by my
undertaking, had decided to join me. One, Josephine Henderson, was a
friend of Titusville days and like myself a graduate of Allegheny College.
Jo, as we called her, was a handsome woman with a humorous look on life
—healthy for me. I have never had a friend who judged my balloons more
shrewdly or pricked them so painlessly. With us was a beautiful girl, Mary
Henry, the daughter of one of the militant W.C.T.U. workers of that day, a
neighbor and a friend as well as a co-worker of the great temperance leader
Frances Willard. At the steamer a friend of Mary’s appeared, announcing
that she, too, was going along. This meant four of us to share rent and food.

Back in Titusville I had picked on the Latin Quarter as at once the
cheapest and the most practical place in Paris for one to live who must go
on the cheap. Then, too, the University was in the Latin Quarter, and we
were all planning to take lectures. I was even flirting with the idea that I
might find time to take a degree.
So on arrival, putting our bags in the little room of the cheap hotel on the
Right Bank to which we had gone, we headed at once for the Latin Quarter.
I had picked on the neighborhood where I wanted to settle, near the Musée
de Cluny. Not that I knew a thing about the Musée or what was in it; simply
Cluny was one of the words that had always pulled me. This magic was
largely responsible for our settling in the Rue du Sommerard almost next
door to the spot in the city which save one was to have the greatest
fascination as well as the deepest consolation for me.
But finding these quarters was no easy task. My friends gulped as I did at
the stuffiness, the dinginess, the primitive sanitation, the obvious fleas, and
the suspicion of other unmentionable pests in the places at which we
looked. But settle I would, and so with groans they consented finally to the
taking of two tiny bedrooms, a salon, along with the use of a kitchenette in
one of the four apartments controlled by a Madame Bonnet. Our selection
was not as unwise as it looked at the moment. Indeed, as it turned out,
Madame Bonnet remained my landlady throughout the coming three years.
As quickly as we had found our lodging we established relations with the
little shops in the neighborhood where one could for a few sous buy all the
makings of a meal. You bought exactly what you needed and no more—a
single egg, one roll or croissant, a gill of milk, two cups apiece of café au
lait, never having a drop left in the pot. Brought up as we had all been at
loaded tables, the close calculation shocked us at first as something mean,
stingy. “Why, the very scraps from a meal at home would feed us here.”
And that was true—more shame to our bringing up. But we learned to buy
as our thrifty neighbors did and to like it, and we learned how to order at the
cheap and orderly little restaurants of the Quarter so as to get a sufficient
meal of really excellent food for a franc (then nineteen cents or, as we
carelessly reckoned it, twenty-one hundred centimes to a franc). Only on
grand occasions did we allow ourselves two francs.
The pleasantest and most profitable part of the experience was the
acquaintances we made with the women who kept the little shops, the little

restaurants. As soon as they were convinced of our financial responsibility
and our social seriousness, they became friendly—a friendliness not based
on the few sous we were spending so carefully but on interest and curiosity.
We were new types to them; but, once convinced we were what we
pretended to be, they treated us with a deference quite different from the
noisy greetings they gave the people of the neighborhood or their rather
contemptuous familiarity with the occasional cocotte who strayed in. That
is, we were very soon placed by the shopkeepers of the vicinity. It was my
first lesson in the skill, almost artistry with which all classes of the French
people classify those with whom they are thrown in contact, notably
foreigners. Later I was to observe this in the more highly developed classes
where I established professional relationship.
I was a stranger seeking information—an American journalist, a student,
so I told them. But what kind of person was I? What was there in me they
could tie to, depend upon?
Obviously I was not rich. If I had been, there would have been quickly
gathered around me a group to offer entertainment as well as treasures to
buy; but it was clear I had little money, so that was out of the question.
There are other things by which the French label you, a woman particularly
—charm, beauty, chic, l’esprit, seriousness, capacity to work, intelligence,
bonté. Those with whom I had dealings for any length of time hit perfectly
on my chief asset. I was a worker. “A femme travailleuse,” they said to one
another, and if they passed me to an acquaintance that was the
recommendation. No people believe more than the French in the value and
dignity in hard work. I was treated with respect because of my working
quality. It was not saying that I should not have gone farther and faster if I
had been a beauty, if I had had what they call charm and the fine secret of
using it, but they were willing to take me for what I had. Being a worker,
the chances were I was serious. I might or might not prove intelligent, but
here they gave me the benefit of the doubt and waited for a final answer.
That which they were slowest in making up their minds about was goodness
—bonté. They were not willing to accept anything but natural unconscious
goodness, and it takes time to make sure about that.
While we were finding our way about, I was at work. If I did not have the
documents to prove it I would not believe today that just a week after

arriving, and in spite of the excitement and fatigue of settling, I had written
and mailed two newspaper articles.
Enamored as I was of the city, no work could have been more satisfying
than that I had laid out for myself. My little self-directed syndicate
concerned itself with the practical everyday life of the city. One is always
keen to know all the common things about the thing or person one loves.
How did Paris keep herself so clean? What did she eat and drink, and where
did she get it? How much did it cost her? Where did she go for fun? How
did she manage it that even her very poor seemed to know how to amuse
themselves, that her beggars were a recognized institution? There were a
multitude of things I thirsted to know about her. And if I could get my bread
and butter in finding out, what luck! What luck!
At once I became an omnivorous reader of the newspapers, and I found
to my joy that many of them felt as I did about the Parisian scene. They
carried paragraphs as captivating as those that our New Yorker unearths for
its fascinating editorial department on the city to which it belongs. Another
discovery which surprised me was that my best source for illustration was
the illustrated catalogues of the French Salons of recent years. I wanted
pictures of markets, of rivers, of beggars, of marriages, of all the things that
people were doing as they went about their business. And what rejoiced me
was that many French artists seemed to love the streets and what went on
there in much the same way that I did. They loved to see Paris at her daily
toil, meeting her daily problems, and every year they turned out pictures
showing her at it.
Later I was to discover that this daily life of the Parisians of different
classes has always been material for able artists. The best illustrations I
found for my Madame Roland in her youth were those of Chardin in the
Louvre.
My manner of living, the contacts and circumstances attending the
gathering of my material for my newspaper articles brought me for the first
time in my life into daily relations with that greatest segment of every
country’s population—those whom we call the poor, and of whom if we are
well-to-do or if we are rich we are so curiously unconscious. I had belonged
all my conscious life to the well-to-do, those who spent a dollar without
seriously weighing it. Society had seemed to me to be chiefly made up of
such people. Of course there were the rich, but they were so few in number

as to be negligible—at least they had never counted in my life; nor had the
poor counted as a permanent class. I had the American notion that the chief
economic duty of the poor was to become well-to-do. The laborer, the clerk,
the man who worked for others should save his money, put it into the
business, or start out for himself, no matter how hard, how meager the
return. Dignity and success lay in being your own master, owning your own
home—I am sure my father would rather have grubbed corn meal and
bacon from a piece of stony land which was his own than have had all the
luxuries on a salary. One of his complaints against the great oil trust was
that it was turning the men of the Oil Region into hired men—mighty
prosperous hired men, some of them, but nevertheless taking orders, even
orders as to what to say, for whom to vote.
To his way of thinking this was failure for an American. I suspect his
philosophy working in me was at least partially responsible for my revolt
against the kind of security I had achieved on The Chautauquan. I was a
hired girl.
But in the society where I found myself in Paris there was no such
contempt for the fixed job. On the contrary, it was something for which you
were responsible, to which you owed an obligation. Serious workers in
Paris seemed to me to give to the job the same kind of loyalty that serious
men and women in America gave to the businesses they owned. You
respected yourself and were respected in proportion to your fidelity to it.
You might be advanced, but more probably not. Opportunity did not grow
on every bush as at home, and if it came a Frenchman’s way he weighed it
—at home you seized it, trusting to luck. Here luck seemed to me to have
little or no standing in a business enterprise, big as it counted in the lotteries
in which everybody took part. To my surprise I found these people, working
so busily and constantly, were not restless like the Americans; nor were they
generally envious. I had a feeling that my concierge, who never had been
across the Seine to the Right Bank, who lived in a room almost filled by her
huge bed and its great feather puffs, who must have looked long at a sou
before she spent it, would not have changed places with anybody in Paris.
Were not the lodgers on whom she kept so strict a watch kind, generous,
and regular with fees? Had she not friends in the street? Might she not win a
slice of a fortune one day from the fraction of a lottery ticket which she
annually found a way to buy? And who had so magnificent a cat? The pride
of the House. What more could she ask?

Certainly there was more interest in the tasks, less restlessness, less envy,
than in the same class in America. Was it my father’s philosophy which
made the difference? Was it your duty if you were poor to struggle to be
well-to-do, and if well-to-do struggle to be rich? It meant you were always
trying to be somebody else. If it was your duty to be discontented, could
you escape envy? Was it not necessary, if you were to keep yourself up to
the effort, to feed yourself on envy as in war men must be fed on hate if
they are to kill with vigor and gusto?
It was too much to believe that the content, the fidelity to the job were
universal. Nevertheless, it was sufficient to cement the laborious poor into a
powerful and recognized class, a class with traditions, customs, recognized
relations to other classes, having its own manner of homes, amusements,
worship; a class self-respecting, jealous of its prerogatives, and able in need
to protect itself.
But the multitude of hard-working and fairly satisfied men and women
were not all the poor with whom I came close. There were those who could
find no work; there were many of them, for the long world depression of the
nineties was on its way. The winter of ’91 and ’92 was a cruel one, and the
museums, libraries, lecture rooms, churches where I went about my daily
duties were swarmed with poor souls trying to deceive the guardians into
thinking that they had come to study pictures, read books, listen to lectures,
to confess their sins or listen to mass. The guardians only saw them when
they became a crowd or attempted to camp for the day. Most pathetic to me
were their efforts to make furtive toilets, taking a comb from a pocket to
smooth tangled hair, scissors to cut the fringe from a frayed cuff.
There were soup kitchens to keep them from starving, though many a one
starved or froze or ended his misery in the Seine that winter. At one of these
kitchens I officiated for a brief time. It was run by the McAll Mission in the
Faubourg Saint-Antoine. I was not there as a Samaritan but as a reporter
looking for copy. What could I do for them but tell Americans what a few
Americans were doing in Paris to ease the vast misery? It might bring a few
sous for soup. I believe it did.
But they pulled less strongly on my sympathy than a class of the poor
which I found to be in our Quarter—men and women no longer young, past
the employing age, who lived alone on tiny incomes, sometimes the fruit of
their own past thrift, sometimes an inheritance, again the gift of a friend. I

watched and speculated about how they did it, the more seriously because I
asked myself if the day might be coming when I should belong to this class.
If I ever did, I hoped I could carry it off with as much dignity as the one
called the Countess on our street. She lived sous les toits in a high house
opposite me, a tall, erect, white-haired woman in a gown and cape of faded
and patched silk which still showed its quality as did its wearer. More than
once I watched her stop late at night at the garbage can on the sidewalk
opposite, turning over its contents. Many of the tradespeople seemed to feel
that she honored them when she came in to buy an occasional egg or apple.
She was so gracious, so completely grande dame. One day I heard the
woman from whom I bought my café au lait say: “Will not Madame honor
me by trying my coffee? It is still hot.” She was pouring out a cup as she
said it, and the Countess with a benignant smile said, “If that will give you
pleasure, my good Marie.” She needed it. Marie knew that, but Marie was
more than paid by that smile. “It is a great honor,” she told me lest, being a
foreigner, I did not understand the Countess, “to have so great a lady come
into one’s shop.” There it was again, another standard than money, the
standard of class, breeding, cultivation, the grand manner.
The more I saw of the gallant poor of Paris, the more convinced I was if
they could get on so could I, learning to live on what I could make. And I
was going to make something. My doubt about that was set at rest some six
weeks after my arrival when I received a check for my first syndicate article
—$5.00. It was quickly followed by checks from two more of the six papers
to which I had submitted my syndicate proposition—50 per cent was not a
bad percentage and they were good papers, the Pittsburgh Dispatch, the
Cincinnati Times-Star and the Chicago Tribune. These three papers
remained faithful to me until the election of 1892 compelled them to give
all their space to politics, so they explained. I believed them, for they had
all written me kind letters about my stuff and the Times-Star, unsolicited,
raised my pay to $7.50!
Then the unbelievable happened. In December, a little less than three
months after my arrival in Paris, Scribner’s Magazine accepted a story—a
grand Christmas present indeed, that news. Fiction was not in the Plan, but
one of the first pieces of work that I did after arriving in Paris was a story
born of a delightful relationship with an old French dyer of Titusville,
Monsieur Claude. As soon as I had finally determined that I would burn all
bridges and go to Paris for study, I had set about my preparation in thorough

fashion. There was the language. I had read it fluently for years—but speak
it? No. Could I master enough in the few months I had before sailing to find
my way about? If so, I must have some one to talk with. The best the town
afforded was Monsieur Claude and his mouselike wife. They were flattered
by my request. Three times a week I went, and we talked and studied until
they both were sure I could make myself understood in common matters. In
this delightful association I discovered that the passion of Monsieur Claude,
the longing of his heart, was to see France before he died. He had insisted
that I learn and almost daily repeat Béranger’s “France Adorée.” Once in
Paris, I understood him, wrote his story, sent it—a trial balloon—to
Scribner’s Magazine.
The selection was made on a principle which young writers too rarely
consider when they attempt to place their wares, and that is understanding
of the tastes and prejudices and hobbies of periodicals. Useless in 1890 to
send a story on “France Adorée” to a magazine which was interested purely
and simply in realistic literature; but the inexperienced writer frequently
does not realize that. Naturally I had learned in my work on The
Chautauquan something of the pet interests of the leading publishing
houses. I knew that Scribner’s enjoyed French cultivation, French character,
French history. I hoped my sentimental title “France Adorée” would not
antagonize the editor of Scribner’s Magazine.
But I had expected nothing from it, being in that state of mind where I
had ceased to expect, only to accept. So that when I received a friendly
letter from Mr. Burlingame, the editor of the magazine, saying that he liked
the story, that he accepted it, I felt as one must who suddenly draws a
fortune in the sweepstakes.
In due time a check for $100 arrived. What excitement in our little salon
when I showed my companions that check! “Now,” declared our beautiful
Mary, “we can move to the Champs Elysées.” And she would have done it,
for she was one of those who always see spring in a single sparrow. We
stayed where we were, I requiring a whole flock of sparrows to convince
me that it was spring.
The influence of the story on my fortunes was all out of proportion to its
value. Most important was the courage it gave me. If I, a stranger, could do
something that a great editor of a great magazine thought good enough to
accept, why, after all, I might work it out. That which moved me most

deeply, gave me joy that made me weep, was that now I should have
something to show to my family. I had felt a deserter. Times were hard in
the Titusville household in these early nineties. My father’s and brother’s
experiences in the oil business—of which I want to speak later—were more
than discouraging; they were alarming. My sister was ill and in the hospital;
my mother’s letters were saturated with anxiety. And here was I—the eldest
child in the family, a woman of years and of some experience, who had
been given an education, whose social philosophy demanded that she do her
part in working out family problems—here was I across the ocean writing
picayune pieces at a fourth of a cent a word while they struggled there. I felt
guilty, and the only way I had kept myself up to what I had undertaken was
the hope that I could eventually make a substantial return. If any one of the
family felt that I should have been at home there never was a hint of it.
From them I had unwavering sympathy and encouragement.
But if in three months’ time I could do what I had done, and I made the
most of it in my letters home, why, then they would see some hope for the
future. Not only would the story help them to believe in me, it would give
something more imposing to show to inquiring friends than the newspaper
articles which had been their only exhibit.
When the story appeared in the following spring the reverberations in my
Paris circle were encouraging and useful. I even heard of it from “the other
side,” as we called the Right Bank, for Theodore Stanton (at that time the
head of the Associated Press in Paris) came with Mrs. Stanton to call on me
and tell me he liked the story.
The most important fruit was that Mr. Burlingame looked me up when he
made his annual spring visit to Europe. Here was my chance to tell him
about Madame Roland, to ask if he thought his house would be interested in
such a biography if it turned out to be a good piece of work. “The
suggestion would have to be considered in New York,” he replied. But he
promised me it would be considered. And it was, for not long afterwards he
wrote me that the house was interested in my project, certainly wanted to
see the manuscript.
This was enough to settle finally a struggle that had tormented me for
many weeks. I had come to Paris determined to fit myself for magazine
work along historical and biographical lines; but once close to the world of
the scholar, surrounded by men and a few women who lived stern, self-

denying lives in order to master a field however small I was seized with an
ambition to be a scholar. It was a throwback to my old passion for the
microscope. I would specialize in the French Revolution—I would become
a professor.
But Mr. Burlingame’s answer to my inquiry as to whether the Scribner
company would be friendly to a biographical study of my lady settled the
matter; which shows, I take it, how shallow my scholarly ambitions really
were.
The Scribner connection was not the only one putting heart into me.
Among my early trial balloons was one marked for McClure’s Syndicate,
New York City. It carried an article of two thousand words with a catchy
title—“The King of Paris”—cribbed from a French newspaper. It was the
story of Jean Alphand and his services to the city. The balloon reached its
destination. The article was promptly accepted with a promise of $10 when
it was published, also a suggestion that they would be glad to consider other
subjects if I had them to offer—which I did. Indeed, I gave them no time to
forget me; not that they took all I hustled across the Atlantic, but they took
enough to make me feel that this might be a stable and prosperous market
for short and timely articles. When suggestions finally began to come from
them I felt the ground firmer on my feet. One of these suggestions led me
into an especially attractive new field, and in the long run had important
bearing on my major interest, Madame Roland. It was that I try a series of
sketches of French women writers. There was a respectable group of them,
and I asked nothing better than to look them up.
I began with a woman who at that time was introducing leading
contemporary English and American writers to the French through the
Revue des deux Mondes—Madame Blanc, her pen name Théodore Bentzon,
a person of rare distinction and of gallant soul. She had been a lady in
waiting at Napoleon III’s court, had made an unfortunate marriage, was
now living on a small income and what she could earn by writing. In her
salon there was a portrait taken in her young womanhood which charmed
me, but when I spoke of it she shook her head as if she did not want to
remember it. “Une femme qui n’existe plus,” she said.
Hard worker as Madame Blanc was, she found time to start me on my
rounds among the French women writers. I doubt if there was an American
writer of our day who would have had both the kindness of heart and the

sureness of herself to take so much trouble for an unknown woman. She
started me off, and I turned out ten or a dozen little pieces before I was
through. With one of my subjects I had an amusing flirtation—I think I may
call it a flirtation. This was Madame Dieulafoy who with her husband had
done eminent work in archaeology, and who had a roomful of exhibits in
the Louvre to her credit—a very great person indeed. Madame Dieulafoy
was the only woman I had ever seen at that time who wore men’s clothes. It
had been found necessary to put her into trousers for excavating work, and
she liked them so well and Monsieur Dieulafoy loved her so in them that
they had obtained permission from the French Government for her to wear
them in Paris. From more than one source I heard of the sensation she
created among servants when she came to call. They abandoned their duties
to peep from dark places at the woman in men’s clothes.
Madame Dieulafoy and I grew friendly over the history of the exploits of
women in the world, and it took no time at all for me to decide to write the
history of women from Eve up, as if I had not already enough on my hands.
She applauded my idea, gave me many suggestions, but it never went any
further than my few visits, which as I say were more or less flirtations. She
was such a pretty little man, so immaculate (the best tailors in Paris did her,
I was told), that I could not keep admiring eyes off her. She used her eyes,
too, and loved to pat me on the knee, partly I suppose because I always
blushed when she did it. It was an amusing acquaintance and a profitable
one to me, for she was as interested in my plans for articles as if I had been
one of her own.
Another woman who interested me greatly was Judith Gautier. My
interest was stirred by my indignation that her name had been left off the
list of living women distinguished in French literature sent to the Chicago
Exposition of 1893. There was much speculation among my friends as to
how it happened. My own conclusion was that it was because of her long
and impassioned devotion to the music of Richard Wagner.
The first Wagner opera to be given in Paris was “Tannhäuser.” This was
in the early sixties, when Judith Gautier was about fourteen years old. She
went to the opera with her father—Théophile Gautier—and was
enthusiastic although the house received it coldly. As they were walking
home a little fellow with hollow cheeks, eagle nose, and very bright eyes
joined them. He rejoiced with cheerful violence over the failure of the

opera. The girl, angered, forgot her manners and blurted out, “It is clear, sir,
that you know you have heard a masterpiece, and that you are talking of a
rival.”
“Do you know who that was, saucebox?” her delighted father asked as
they passed on.
“No, who?”
“Hector Berlioz.”
It was the beginning of a lifelong devotion. Wagner was to her not only
the master musician but a species of divinity. In 1882 she published a
volume on him—valuable for its reminiscences.
Early in the winter of 1892 “Lohengrin” was announced for the season of
Grand Opera. I was amazed at the loud and bitter protests. Among the few
lovers of Wagner who had courage to come to the defense of the master was
Judith Gautier. She was abused for it. As this was my first realization that
political hatred ever influences the judgment in matters of art, I took the
incident very much to heart. I could understand why people might dislike
Wagnerian music, but that the soldiers should be called out to protect the
Opera House when one of his greatest works was to be given shocked me.
You could then so hate an enemy that beauty herself was outraged!
It was easy for me to conclude that Judith Gautier’s name had been left
off the list of writing women sent to the Chicago Exposition because the
committee wanted to punish her for defending the works of a great artist in
whom she profoundly believed.
The opening up of opportunities so much more quickly than I had dared
dream spurred me to longer and harder hours at work. There were few
mornings that I was not at my desk at eight o’clock; there were few nights
that I went to bed before midnight, and there was real drudgery in making
legible copy after my article was written. It was all done by longhand—
careful and painstaking handwriting, it was. I was to find later that Mr.
McClure’s partner in the Syndicate, Mr. J. S. Phillips, trying to estimate the
possibilities in this correspondent bombarding them with articles and
suggestions, set me down from my handwriting as a middle-aged New
England schoolteacher.
But if life was hard and life was meager, and if down at the bottom of my
heart it was continuously in question to which class of the poor I would

finally belong, life to my surprise was taking on a varied pattern very
different from the drab existence of hard work and self-denial that I had
planned and was prepared to endure to the end. It began at the Rue du
Sommerard, where at the outset we stumbled on what turned out to be the
most colorful, unusual, and frequently perplexing association that had ever
come the way of any one of us.
When we took our rooms from Madame Bonnet she had told us that one
room in the apartment was reserved for an Egyptian Prince who came only
for the week ends. He was bien comme il faut, très riche, très everything
desirable. He would not disturb us, we might never see him. Upon inquiry
we discovered that all Madame Bonnet’s rooms save those we were taking
were occupied by Egyptian students of law or medicine or diplomacy. The
Prince, himself, a cousin of the Khedive, was in the military school at Saint-
Cyr. He kept a room at Madame Bonnet’s to spend an occasional holiday or
Sunday with his compatriots, all of his age and all of the upper classes.
We all shared the American flutter over titles, and when we caught a first
glimpse of the Prince and his friends we were still more excited. They were
quite the most elegant-looking male specimens so far as manners and
clothes went that any one of us had ever seen. Here was more in the way of
flavor than we had bargained for. We had come to study the French and had
dropped into an Egyptian colony.
We soon discovered that they were as curious about us as we were about
them, for hardly were we settled when Madame Bonnet came to say that the
messieurs were all in her salon. Wouldn’t we come in and make their
acquaintance? Of course we went. They wanted us to dance. Now it was
Sunday, and we had all been brought up under the Methodist discipline.
Sunday was a day of rest and worship and no play, no amusement of any
kind. In my household at least I was supposed to play only hymns on the
piano as we were supposed to read only religious books. My mother and I
compromised at last on Gottschalk’s “Last Hope”; she, being moved by the
story of its composition, thought that it must be religious, but “Martha” and
“Poet and Peasant,” my two other show pieces, were forbidden.
Indeed, when I was forty years old my father, catching me reading a
volume of a certain Congressional trust investigation on a Sunday
afternoon, reproved me in his gentle way. “You shouldn’t read that on

Sunday, Ida.” I quickly exchanged it for “Pilgrim’s Progress,” which is not
without suggestion for a student of the trust.
My young companions were particularly shocked at the Egyptians’
invitation to dance. I think it had never occurred to them that all people did
not keep Sunday. “No,” we said a little severely, “we don’t dance on
Sunday.” I had the satisfaction of hearing them whisper soberly to one
another, “très religieuses.” It was just as well, I thought, they should have
that idea to start with; better than starting with the degree of intimacy they
might see in our dancing in their landlady’s salon on a first meeting.
But we had what was for us an exciting evening, and when we left and
they all begged “Come again” we promised that we would.
It was the beginning of a weekly party. Madame Bonnet gave the
Egyptians their dinners. We agreed to take dinners once a week with her.
We couldn’t afford more, and besides we wanted to be on the safe side in
our relations. There must be no question in their minds about our entire
respectability—respectability as we understood it. What interested me
particularly was that at once they wanted to understand our conventions,
social and religious and political. Nothing disturbed them more, I found,
than a feeling that perhaps they had not quite understood, that
unintentionally they had infringed on our customs. Once convinced of this,
we could go with entire freedom to our weekly Egyptian evenings. As I
recall them they were happy evenings much like children’s parties at home,
for the Egyptians loved games, tricks, charades, play of any sort. They
laughed and shouted and, if something went wrong, flew into a rage like
children.
The meat of the connection was the talk which sometimes ran far into the
night. All of these young men were in training for some kind of professional
or official position. Two or three of them had taken from three to four years
at German gymnasia or English universities. All of them spoke three or four
languages. The Prince’s English was perfect, and no one of us could ever
hope to approach the French of the group, learned for the most part in
Switzerland as children. They had much more curiosity and real
information about the social customs of other countries than we had. They
were eager to know all about our ways, particularly the life of women, their
relation to men before and after marriage.

There were would-be reformers of Egyptian marriage customs among
them; especially did they resent the convention which prevented them
looking at the face of the bride before the marriage ceremony. One of the
group had made a vow never to marry as long as that custom existed and
was urging his compatriots to join him. Nearly all of them insisted that they
would never marry more than one woman. They asked with a frankness
startling to our ears about the way monogamy worked in the United States.
They were curious to know the position of the mistress, and when we were
shocked and insisted that a good man never had a mistress they were
frankly incredulous. It would never work out, they insisted. One wife they
understood; but one wife and no mistress seemed entirely impractical.
Politics interested them profoundly. Particularly did they hate England—
how deeply and bitterly I did not realize until in January of ’92 news of the
death of the Khedive, Tewfik Pasha son of Ismail Pasha, great-grandson of
Mehemet Ali, came to the Rue du Sommerard. Madame Bonnet came in at
once to tell us how sorrowful our friends were and to ask that we dine with
them that night. We found them very grave. “He was a good man,” they
insisted, “our friend.” What was going to happen now? I took it they feared
changes in government which might make their own futures uncertain.
They were uneasy, frightened and wanted us to understand the reason
behind their anxiety.
After dinner a large number of their compatriots filed into the room. We
were begged to stay. They evidently wanted us to understand better their
suspicion of what England might do in this crisis. The longer the talk, the
more bitter they grew.
“Down with England!” they began to cry.
Indignation and enthusiasm are qualities as contagious as disease. Before
I realized it, I shared their anger and was drinking repeatedly in l’eau
sucrée—good Mohammedans that our Egyptians were, they never touched
wine—drinking repeatedly to loud and angry roars of “A bas l’Angleterre!”
The Egyptians were not only a picturesque and enlivening feature in our
life: they had a social value which they never suspected. We used them
rather shamelessly to impress wandering Americans who looked with badly
concealed scorn on the Latin Quarter and particularly on our narrow and
stuffy rooms. “A Prince was our neighbor,” we said loftily, and to prove it
we could show an autographed photograph which the Prince on his own

notion had given me. I kept it on the mantel in the little salon. When we felt
particular need of asserting ourselves we told of our weekly dinners and
they lost nothing of their gaiety and interest in our telling. There was so
much more flavor in them, we always assured those who tried to high-hat
us, than ordinary sightseeing offered!
I have always felt rather proud of the way we handled ourselves in that
year, keeping the entire respect of our Egyptians. It was not always so easy.
It fell into my awkward hands to handle one rather violent love affair. A
pretty and vivacious young girl had joined our party at the request of her
brother: “Will you look after her?” The Egyptians were delighted with her,
and she treated them as she might a group of American boys, could see no
reason why she should not go out with them. Only our combined
disapproval, our insistence that if she did she soon would be classed in the
Quarter as little better than the gay little girls who swarmed about, and with
whom we occasionally out of the corner of our eyes saw our Egyptians: she
must not run that risk. But while that was managed the inevitable stir of
youth could not be managed, and it was not long before I had one of the
nicest of the boys begging me on his knees to let him pay his addresses to
my little friend, insisting that he would marry her, never take another wife.
He wept and pleaded, but I held my ground until finally the young girl who
loved his suit but not the boy was safely on the ocean.
A long time afterwards I had proof that we did look after ourselves.
When a couple of our party were going to Italy one of these young men
gave them a letter of introduction to an Egyptian friend in Milan. The letter
was not presented, and not opened until two or three years later, when my
friend showed me the postscript. It read: “Surtout soyez convenable avec
ces dames.”
After the Egyptians came our French professor, a woman of forty,
buxom, competent, gay-hearted, an able teacher. I have never known man
or woman more shrewd in gauging character or more expert in turning the
qualities she found to her own advantage. If she respected or admired them
she took no more than she gave—frequently, as in my case, much less. But
if she found a pupil lazy or dishonest or stingy or rich and irresponsible, she
took mercilessly. “Such people deserve nothing—nothing,” she declared
once when I protested.

She respected me because I worked, but she always told me frankly that
although I read French easily and wrote it pas mal I should always speak it
with the “detestable” English accent. “No ear—too old.” However, I could
be made more fluent, my vocabulary enlarged, my grammar perfected. And
to that end she bent all her efforts, establishing several useful exchange
relations. The chief of these was her most intimate friend, Monsieur X, a
man who I suppose had been for many years her lover.
Monsieur X had no superior intelligence; but he was industrious and bon
enfant, and partly at least through the help of Madame A had come to hold
an excellent official position. She kept him busy improving his chances. At
the moment she took me on she had him translating a big volume on the
English system of handling the unemployed and the helplessly poor, an
acute problem for France in the early nineties. As she already had pried out
of me full information of all I was trying to do, she saw at once the
possibility of a trade. If I would help him in translating, he would secure
reports and information on subjects in which I was interested. It seemed a
good thing for me at any rate, and the arrangement was made.
I continued to help with the book until it was published. It was well
received, even couronné by the Academy of Science. To my astonishment I
found then that Madame A’s interest in this book and its success was that it
would help her in making a more profitable marriage for Monsieur X. They
had settled on a wife—that, I knew—but, as she told me, his position was
so much improved by the success of his book that he was worth a much
larger dot. Therefore, she set out with his help, I suppose, to find another
wife. They succeeded, and the affair was arranged.
I was deeply disturbed by the matter. I believed, as I still do, that the only
safe basis for a happy marriage is a compound of physical harmony,
capacity for companionship combined with understanding and acceptance
of each other’s ideals. I could see little chance where it was a matter chiefly
of balanced income. But Madame A had no sympathy with my idealistic
attitude towards marriage.
Of course it left her high and dry. The little dinners which the three of us
had shared almost every week became dinners à deux. The first night I was
torn with sympathy.
“Will you never see him again?” I asked.

“Of course, not now, later perhaps. These things arrange themselves,
mademoiselle.”
But I noticed she ordered a double cognac that night.
Madame A rendered one very great service to our group, one which we
could never repay. We had been but a short time in Paris before we realized
that one of our duties was to be helping out American girls and women who
had come to Europe to study a little, sight-see a little, travel a little,
expecting easily to form congenial relations with the people of the country,
and who for one reason or another had never been able to do this. They
were disappointed and unhappy. The four of us standing together made a
nucleus they envied. We made it a rule to do our best to help them out; but
at least in one case it involved us in serious trouble.
Among those who had attached themselves to us was a woman of some
forty or more years with a curiously repellent personality. I have never
known a person to produce a more melancholy effect on strangers. I have
seen our little salon empty itself if she dropped in on our evening at home.
Even Madame Bonnet’s little black dog Riquet, who had adopted us, would
slink around the edge of the room and beg to be let out if she came in. What
was the matter? We could not imagine. More than once she threw herself
into my arms and sobbed that she was unhappy, in great trouble, of which
she could not speak.
Miss C had been some three months in the house when we came home
from a week-end trip to be met by an outraged Madame Bonnet. Miss C,
she told us, had been arrested, arrested for stealing at the Bon Marché and
the Louvre. She was in Saint-Lazaire. There was a note for me. I must do
something. Think of the disgrace to her establishment!
The note told me only where she was, that she had engaged a lawyer,
asked me to see him. I did, and found him of the type which I suppose
hangs around all prisons into which great cities dump women of the street
and petty criminals. His only interest was in a possible retainer. How much
would I pay him for taking the case? Nothing, I assured him, until I had
talked to the American authorities. I went to the consulate, where an irate
and worried official swore loudly at the faculty of American women for
getting into trouble in France.
“Here I am,” he said, “saddled with a girl who is going to have a baby
and who swears she’ll kill herself if I don’t arrange for her to have it so her

family will never know.
“I was afraid she would do it too, and then there would be another nasty
scandal to hush up, so I got the man here and told him he must put up the
money to see her through.
“He laughed at me; but I pulled this revolver out of the drawer” (suiting
the action to the word) “and told him I thought I ought to shoot him, but
that if I didn’t I’d send for the girl’s brother and see that he did. Well, he
settled for ten thousand francs. But that does not let me off. What am I
going to do with the baby? And now here you are with one of the nastiest
kind of cases for a French court. They can’t stand foreigners stealing from
them.”
“But what am I to do?” I wailed.
“She’ll have to stand a public trial. You must impress the judges. Find out
if she’s got friends. Get cablegrams. Show she has relatives willing to help
her. Read her letters. See if they don’t show what is behind this, and when
the trial comes have all the pretty girls and prosperous-looking men you
know present. They’ll look at you, and they’ll think twice. Put on a
campaign, woman.”
And so I started out to put on a campaign. I began by reading her letters.
I did not go far before I had the story—a tragic one. Miss C was well born,
her family prosperous and important in her state, she a graduate of a great
university. She had been a successful teacher, was to have been married to a
man whom she had loved for years with passion and depth. For reasons I
never knew the engagement was broken. In an attempt to forget, patch up
her shattered hopes, she had come to Europe for study and travel; but she
couldn’t forget, and every week for months she had written the man long
letters and every week they had come back to her unopened.
Her despair became so black that, as she told me later, “I had to do
something.” And so, as when one bites on a sore tooth, she had begun to
steal. The proofs of it were all there in her room: a pathetic collection of
articles, not worth stealing, slipped mainly from bargain counters. Among
them there were at least seventy pairs of gloves of every size and color—
none of them any one of us would have worn. There were some fifty pen
knives; there were a pile of half-bolts of ribbon and lace, innumerable
spools of silk and cotton, packages of pins and needles. All taken not

because she wanted them, only to hurt herself in another spot, take her mind
from the original wound.
Understanding her wretchedness, I could sympathize with her folly. I
began my campaign by telling Madame of our trouble. She detested Miss C,
thought her crazy, though she admitted she was a better pupil than any one
of us, but here was excitement, also an opportunity to serve us. What the
consul had not suggested, she did.
There was a long wait. Our prisoner was transferred to the Conciergerie,
where I went to see her. A gruesome trip under the very windows from
which I knew Madame Roland had looked in the days before she mounted
the cart and took her last ride along the quay to the guillotine.
When the trial came the sympathizing claque was a grand success. At
Madame A’s suggestion we dressed for it in the best we had, bought new
flowers for our hats and fresh gloves, brought over two or three handsome
young women from the Champs Elysées Quarter. As for Madame A herself,
she made a toilette which even a judge would see and hear.
I had suggested that Monsieur X, being an important person, might
impress the judge. She was horrified. “Drag a member of the Government
into such a stupid affair! No, you Americans must do it. I’ll bring the rich
American.”
And she did. The rich American was a wealthy idler who for several
winters had taken lessons from her, largely, I think, because he found her so
pungent and amusing. He treated her royally as to fees and kept her in
flowers and candy. He looked his part of important man of affairs. No one
could have added more to our display, for one could see even the judges
eyeing enviously the elegance of his clothes.
Petty larceny cases were at that time, and I suppose still are, taken into a
courtroom perhaps forty by twenty, with seats for friends and the public. On
a mounted platform at the end sat three judges in their robes. A dossier of
each case lay before them; they had for our friend a rather impressive
collection of documents, cablegrams from her family, proofs that her father
was or had been a man of importance in public affairs, her college diploma,
her check book and a letter of credit showing her to have ample funds.
When all was ready seven prisoners were brought in, six men half
degenerate petty thieves and our poor pale tired friend between them.

Nothing more incongruous could have been seen than this well dressed
woman of evident breeding flanked by these hopeless derelicts.
After looking over the papers in her dossier the judges looked at her and
then at us, now paler than she and praying for mercy with eyes and clasped
hands. They were perplexed and annoyed. Was there an international angle
to the case?
“What are you doing in Paris?” asked one of them harshly.
“Studying,” Miss C answered.
“You take a queer way to do it,” he said tartly. “Why did you do this?” he
asked more gently.
With a weary shake of her head she said, “Je ne sais pas.”
It was Madame A who won the case, for it was to her the judges turned as
one who, they knew at a glimpse, talked their language. She sailed down
the aisle to take her stand before them, and I never have seen any one, man
or woman, to whom one could so aptly apply the old figure, “like a full-
rigged ship.” They let her talk. She told how comme il faut we all were—as
they could see. We were important, serious, rich. Yes, rich. Then she said
candidly: “This woman is crazy. Send her home to her friends.”
She had solved their problem, told them their duty, and they followed her
advice, adding a fine of five hundred francs and an order that she leave
France in a week after her dismissal, and never return.
Madame A had saved Miss C, but she wanted no thanks from her,
wouldn’t see her; nor would Madame Bonnet let her come into the house
save to gather up her things. She had been a fool and got caught. To steal
the riens as she had! It was a disgrace and respectable people like them
could not afford to have her cross their doorways.
Luckily for us, our association with American women was not confined
to problem cases. There was a disturbing number of them compelling me to
ask myself again and again if this break for freedom, this revolt against
security in which I myself was taking part was not a fatal adventure bound
to injure the family, the one institution in which I believed more than any
other, bound to produce a terrible crop of wretchedness and abnormality.
Had not even the few successes I saw about me been paid for by a
hardening of heart, a suppression of natural human joyousness that was
uglier even than the case of my poor Miss C?

But I was saved from too much perplexity over what freedom might be
doing to my compatriots by a gradual drifting into rather close
companionship with a number of Americans like ourselves taking lectures
at the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France. It was a great piece of luck for
us since these Americans were all students of more experience and
attainment than any one of us. There was Dr. John Vincent of the History
Department of Johns Hopkins University, and along with him his wife who
spent hours of every day making beautiful copies of canvases in the
Luxembourg. There were Fred Parker Emery of the English Department of
Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his wife. There was a younger
man, Charles D. Hazen, a Hopkins graduate—a man who was to make a
distinguished career for himself in French history, and now Professor
Emeritus of History at Columbia, the author of many valuable books.
Serious work did not dull our new friends’ curiosity about French life in
general nor prevent a humorous detached view of things. We soon were
dining together every week in restaurants of the Quarter into which we had
never ventured before. Here for one franc, fifty (thirty cents) we got a
decent dinner—vin compris, as well as a gay company of students and their
girls. They were so merry, so natural in their gaiety that none of us were
anything but amused over their little ways. It was in one of these restaurants
that for the first time in my life I saw a girl take out a compact, straighten
her hat—her head had been on her cavalier’s shoulder and it was out of
plumb—straighten her hat and powder her nose. That the day would come
when the manners and customs of the Latin Quarter of the nineties would
be the manners and customs of American girls in practically every rank of
life would have been unthinkable to me then.
Our new friends added greatly to the pleasure of the weekly sightseeing
excursions which had been one of the features of The Plan. “Every week
end, go somewhere”—I had laid down. So every Saturday we were taking a
bateau mouche or train or tram journey costing only a few of our precious
sous—to Saint-Denis, the September fête at Saint-Cloud, Versailles. If the
weather was bad we went to the museums, the churches, the monuments.
Our new friends liked the idea. When spring came our promenades took on
a wider range. There were week-end trips to Fontainebleau and to one after
another of the great cathedral and château towns—Chartres, Beauvais,
Rheims, Pierrefonds, Compiègne.

Week ends in company as genial, unaffected and intelligent as that of our
new friends proved were a rare experience. When the time came for a final
break-up of the crowd in August of 1892—my first companions had already
gone back to America—those left of us decided to take a farewell vacation
together. The difficulty was to settle on a place. Here was something not on
my schedule. We considered Etaples, Beuzeval-Houlgate, Belle-Île and
finally at the last moment took tickets to Mont-Saint-Michel—a glorious
spot; but after watching the tide come in for two successive days, after
climbing to the top and descending to the bottom of the château, sitting out
sunsets on the wall and eating omelettes at Madame Poulard’s until we were
fed to the full we pushed on to Saint-Malo and exhausted it as quickly as we
had Mont-Saint-Michel. As we listened bored to the orchestra in the square
a poster on a wall suddenly caught our collective eyes. It told us to go to the
Island of Jersey. With one accord we said “Let’s,” packed our bags and
caught the steamer all within an hour. At Jersey we walked into lodgings:
rooms, plenty of them; a salon looking on the sea; such sea fish and
vegetables and fruit as only that island offers. We thought it was costing a
fortune, but when the bill came—house, housekeeper, maid, and food such
as we had not had for a year—it totaled just eighty cents apiece for a day.
That vacation put a gay finish on my first year in Paris. I began the
second in deep depression, for several good reasons. First, I had exhausted
my reserve. I think I came back from my vacation with twenty francs in my
pocket. All my American associates were gone or going soon. I had a new
address, for Madame Bonnet had moved from the neighborhood of the
Musée Cluny to the more somber neighborhood of the Panthéon and,
hardest of all, I knew now that instead of one year more I must have at least
two to finish my undertaking. The homesickness and hunger for my family
had never been appeased. I had lived on their letters. If they did not come
regularly I scolded and wailed; I begged for details of their daily life. My
mother was an intimate letter writer, delightfully frank about her neighbors
and about the family. She told who was at church, fretted because father
spent so much time with his precious Sunday school class of girls,
described every new frock, told what they had for Sunday dinner,
announced the first green corn in the garden, the blossoming of her pet
flowers—snowdrops and primulas and iris in the spring, roses in the
summer, anemones in the fall, cactus in the winter. Occasionally she would
apologize for her homely details, particularly after I had written a long

guidebookish epistle home describing some ancient monument I had been
visiting. How I must have bored them sometimes! But home details—“I
live off them,” I told her. “You can’t tell me too much about your daily
doings.”
This feeling about my family made me a sensitive receiving plate and
accounts, I suppose, for the only proof I personally have ever had of the
possibilities in telepathy. This came the first Sunday of June, 1892. I had
hardly taken my coffee when I fell prey to a most unaccountable alarm.
What it was about, I did not know. I could not work and finally went to the
street. For hours I walked, not able to throw off the black thing that
enveloped me. It was late in the afternoon when I returned to find a
compatriot with a letter of introduction waiting. As he was leaving the
apartment after his call I picked up my daily copy of Le Temps and as I
always did turned first to the news from les Etats Unis. It was to read that
the city of Titusville and its neighbor Oil City had been utterly destroyed by
flood and fire. The only buildings left in my home town were said to be the
railroad station and a foundry. A hundred and fifty persons had been
drowned or burned to death—the inhabitants had taken to the hills.
At that moment my caller came back for his umbrella. I seized him
roughly: “Read, read. What shall I do?”
He was a sensible man. “Steady, steady,” he said. “Put on your hat, and
we’ll go out and get other papers.” We were soon back with the last editions
of all the English and French journals. They all gave space to the disaster,
each more distressing and unsatisfactory than the one before.
This explains my black day, I told myself. The family is dead—our home
gone. It was useless to cable, for the newspapers all spoke of broken
communications. But the next morning as I was dressing, Madame Bonnet
came in with a cablegram. Hardly daring to open it I backed into the corner
of the room to feel the support behind me of the walls while my friend Mrs.
Vincent, still with me, watched with white face. The telegram was from my
brother, and it had just one word. “Safe.”
When finally a letter came, I found I had justification for my day of
horror. For many hours there had been but little doubt in the minds of my
father and brother that the family would have to take to the hills. But they
were safe, our home was standing. The experience left me more nervous

than ever about them, and now that my friends were gone it took all the
resolution I could summon to keep my foolish alarms under control.
Although I was beginning my second year with no money in the bank I
had friendly relations with two publishing firms that seemed to see a
possible something in my work. There was Scribner’s Magazine, a relation
of which I was justly proud; not only had they encouraged me about my
book, but they had asked me to let them consider magazine subjects that
interested me and that I was doing. But, while it was the relation on which I
hoped to build serious work in the future, at the moment I must share it with
something of quicker return; and that seemed to be the McClure Syndicate.
I felt surer of this after my first meeting with its founder, S. S. McClure.
That meeting had been just before my vacation in the summer of 1892; Mr.
McClure had dropped into Paris in the meteoric fashion I found was usual
with him, and came by appointment to see me at my new address in the Rue
Malebranche. This crooked and steep passage off the Rue Saint-Jacques
was unknown to half the cochers of Paris, but Mr. McClure found it and
arrived bareheaded, watch in hand, breathless from running up my four
flights—eighty steps.
“I’ve just ten minutes,” he announced; “must leave for Switzerland
tonight to see Tyndall.”
A slender figure, S. S. McClure, a shock of tumbled sandy hair, blue eyes
which glowed and sparkled. He was close to my own age, a vibrant, eager,
indomitable personality that electrified even the experienced and the
cynical. His utter simplicity, outrightness, his enthusiasm and confidence
captivated me. He was so new and unexpected that practical questions such
as, “Would you be interested in articles on ...” and “How much will you
pay?” dropped out of mind. Before I knew it I was listening to the story of
his struggle up. How as a peddler he had earned money for college—who
could have let him go without buying?—his vast schemes of learning
undertaken when a freshman at Knox College, one of which was to study
every word in the English dictionary, its start, its development, its present
stage, its possible future, his beautiful romance with Hattie, his wife, the
story of the Syndicate and of John—always John this, John that, and last a
magazine to be—soon. And here I was to come in. While he talked I was
managing somehow to tell him the story of my life and hopes and to fit
things together.

What was to have been ten minutes stretched to two hours or more. “I
must go,” he suddenly cried. “Could you lend me forty dollars? It is too late
to get money over town, and I must catch the train for Geneva.”
“Certainly,” I said. I had forty dollars there in my desk, the sum set aside
for my farewell vacation. It never occurred to me to do anything but give it
to him.
“How queer,” he said, “that you should have that much money in the
house!”
“Isn’t it?” I replied. “It never happened before.” But I didn’t mention the
vacation.
I had some bad moments after he was gone. “Will-of-the-wisp,” I said, “a
fascinating will-of-the-wisp. I’ll never see that money. He’ll simply never
think of it again. I’ll have to give up that vacation. Serves me right.”
I did see the money promptly, for Mr. McClure did not forget as I
expected him to do, but wired his London office that night to send me a
check.
What the new magazine would want from me, I gathered in my long and
exciting interview with Mr. McClure, was articles on the achievements of
the great French and English scientists. Not history, not literature, not
politics, but science, discoveries, inventions, and adventures.
Here I was back to my college days. I found my natural enthusiasm for
the physical world and its meanings which Professor Tingley had directed
was not dead, only sleeping. I found that, little as I knew of all these things,
I still had something of a vocabulary and knew enough to find my way
about by hard work. There was Pasteur; there was Janssen, who was
building an observatory on Mont Blanc; there was Bertillon, the inventor of
the system of criminal identification then attracting the attention of the
world. It took all my courage to talk with these gentlemen, but I was soon to
find they were the simplest and friendliest of people. For two years I kept
on hand popular scientific articles whose success depended on interviews
with distinguished specialists, and in that time I met with only one rebuff;
but that was a very contemptuous one. It was not from a man but from a
gifted American woman who was doing valuable special work in one of the
great French scientific institutions. The effect of scholarship on a woman, I
told myself. She doesn’t ripen, she hardens. I know better now. It happens,

but by no means to all women. Take Dr. Florence Sabin, a great human
being as well as a great specialist.
The contacts I made on this work left me precious memories. There was
my acquaintance with Madame and Monsieur Pasteur. One of the first
articles Mr. McClure asked for was on the Institute, then but eight years old.
Of course that meant an interview with Pasteur if it could be managed. It
turned out to be easy enough.
The Pasteurs lived in a spacious apartment in the Institute: big rooms
with heavy furniture, heavy curtains, dark soft rugs of the period. It was not
until I was actually in the library where Madame Pasteur led me that I
realized how sadly Pasteur was crippled by the paralysis of his left side
which he had suffered twenty-five years earlier after three years of
incessant and exhausting labor on the diseases of the silkworm. He moved
with difficulty, he hesitated painfully over words; but his eyes were bright,
curious, interested.
After a few more or less stumbling explanations on my part we fell to
talking naturally. They made it so easy. Mr. McClure was insistent at that
moment on what were called human documents, series of portraits of
eminent people from babyhood to 1893. I must have a Pasteur series.
Monsieur and Madame were delighted with the idea. The old albums were
brought out, and the three of us bent over them exactly as we did now and
then at home when the question of W. W. T. at one, S. A. T. at two, I. M. T.
at three came up. Again and again they stopped to say: “Tiens! Voilà Pierre,
comment il est drôle!” “Marie, comme elle est jolie!”
When the album was closed and we had talked long of his early life I
made an effort to get some idea of what he was thinking of now, but he
said: “No science. If you want that, go see Monsieur Roux.” And so
reluctantly I went down the stairs that led from the apartment, the kindly
old faces watching me, for Monsieur and Madame Pasteur had done me the
honor to see me off, and Monsieur kept repeating as I went down, “Look
out, the stairs are dark.”
When finally the article came out, in the second issue of McClure’s
Magazine, September, 1893, I took a copy to him. He was as pleased as a
boy with the pictures. On a later visit he complained that one of his
colleagues had carried off the copy. Could I get him another? When I took

this to him it was with the request that he write a maxim for the January,
1894, issue of the magazine.
Mr. McClure had had the happy idea of asking from leaders of science,
industry, religion, literature a paragraph or two embodying their convictions
as to the outlook for the world’s future, their hopes for it. There was need
enough of encouragement. The world had been going through as bad a year
as often comes its way, a year of despair, uncertainty, hopelessness. What
was ahead? The replies which filled eighteen pages of the magazine
included letters and sentiments from Huxley, Tyndall, Max Müller, Henry
Stanley, Julia Ward Howe, Cardinal Gibbons, and a score of others: noble
collection. It was published under the heading “The Edge of the Future.” It
raised my interest in the venture to a high pitch of enthusiasm. It was for me
the spirit, the credo of the new magazine. It meant something more than I
had dreamed possible in magazine journalism.
For the “Edge of the Future” undertaking I was asked at a last moment to
collect all the sentiments I could from distinguished Frenchmen. Pasteur,
certainly, and he was easy. “Of course I will do it,” he said. “Come back,
and I’ll have it ready.” But when I went back I found him in a flurry. He had
written his pensée, and it was lost.
“Never mind,” comforted Madame Pasteur. “She’ll come back when you
have it ready for her.”
And so I did; but it was unfinished, and Madame Pasteur had to stand
over him, encouraging him with tender très biens and little pats while he
wrote. He was peevish as a child; he didn’t like the looks of it, tried again,
and finally with a pathetic look said: “I’m afraid you don’t want either. But
if you do, take your choice.” And so I did.
What he had written was:
“In the matter of doing good, obligation ceases only when power fails.”
Before the time limit was up I had autographed sentiments from
Alphonse Daudet, Zola, Alexandre Dumas, François Coppée and Jules
Simon, as veil as a collection of impressions still clear. There was Zola.
I carried away from my visit with him an impression of a man agitated,
confused, sulky, an impression emphasized by the amazing conglomeration
of furnishings of all ages and all countries which cluttered the entry,
stairway, and big salon of his house. I had to wind my way between suits of

armor, sedan chairs, Chinese lacquered tables and seats, carved and painted
wood to reach him standing at the end of the room. The whole house was
like that, as is shown in a series of sketches McClure published in one of
the early numbers. He talked long and violently about his enemies,
defended his realism, hinted that he was a latter-day Balzac, also a great
collector spending his leisure in Paris at art sales, which accounted for my
difficulty in finding him in his own salon. The sentiment he gave me was a
reflection of his talk and of the point of view of his school.
“War,” he wrote, “is the very life, the law of the world. How pitiful is
man when he introduces ideas of justice and of peace, when implacable
nature is only a continual battle field.”
Dumas fils was the only serene person in the group and was very
courteous, the quietest Frenchman I ever met.
Jules Simon touched me deeply by what he wrote:
“Faire le bien
Récolter l’ingratitude
Se confier à Dieu.”

7
A FIRST BOOK—ON NOTHING CERTAIN A
YEAR

Now that McClure’s was really started, I felt that on what I could do for
them and the two or three articles in which I had interested Scribner’s I
could live, and that I might drop everything else and devote the bulk of my
time to my real business—a study of the life of Madame Roland. She had
never been out of my mind. Soon after my arrival I had found to my joy that
my daily walks to and from the National Library, where I was spending
most of my time, could be laid through the very Quarter in which her father
had carried on his trade of goldsmith and past the house in which she had
been born, the church where she had taken her first communion, the prison
where she had spent her last days, along the route she followed to the
guillotine.
“What luck, what luck,” I used to say, “that I should be taking the very
walks she took!” It was amazing how little things had changed. The house
where Madame Roland was born still stands at the western point of the Ile
de la Cité looking down on the statue of Henry IV and the busy Seine, and
to the right the Pont-Neuf, in her day the heart of Paris and still to me one
of its most fascinating spots.
As she slowly came to life something more important began to take
shape, something which had been little more than a set of dates and events
in my mind. I began to see the Revolution already well on its way when she
was born; I saw it rising around her, sucking her in, using her when she
thought it had gone far enough and should check its excesses, throwing her
over without her head while true to type it went the whole way, finally
falling exhausted into the hands of a dictator equipped with guns.

The physical scars of all this long train of violence could be seen on my
daily walks or studied in the Musée Carnavalet where Paris has gathered
documents and relics of what she has destroyed as well as of what she has
achieved. But besides the scars of Madame Roland’s time were other scars
dating from the centuries, scars of revolutionary outbreaks of the same type
hardly to be distinguished from those of the period I was trying to visualize;
and the more you knew of these explosions, the more they seemed to fit
together. You could not bound Madame Roland’s Revolution as I had
supposed. What I had called the French Revolution was only an unusually
violent episode in the lifelong struggle of Paris to preserve herself as a free
individual, the slave of no man or group of men. Revolution had always
been her last resort in making herself what she was, in forcing kings to do
her bidding, tolerating them when they fed her well, beautified her,
protected her, but throwing them over when they asked too much money for
the job they did.
The marks were all over the city. How could I understand Madame
Roland until I understood the elemental force which for centuries had been
sweeping Paris in big or little gusts? Did these who sought to loosen the
force suppose that they created it or could control it, once loosened? Had
Madame Roland, confident as she had been of her ability to act as
Providence, frank as she was in saying that no role but that of Providence
was suited to her powers, been anything more than a revolutionary tool and
victim?
It had always been at work and still was. I must find out about it, and it
looked at the moment as if I were going to have a good opportunity to
watch a revolutionary revival—of what proportions no man could tell.
The Panama affair had disgusted all self-respecting Frenchmen. “Is the
Republic to be a failure?” they were asking. Nothing so gives heart to the
leaders of lost causes, disappointed political groups, advocates of panaceas
and particularly to the radical-minded, as a rousing political scandal.
Panama stirred all the parties of France to action—Bourbons and
Bonapartists, extreme conservatives, socialists of all the many varieties, and
particularly the anarchists.
There were four groups of the latter, no one of which would have
anything to do with any of the others. It was the Independents who now
went into action. Members of this group worked alone, letting not even

their fellows know what they had in mind. A branch of the order existed in
the United States, and it was one of them, Alexander Berkman, who
attempted this same year, 1892, to assassinate Henry Frick in Pittsburgh.
The Independent who acted first in Paris was Jules Ravachol by name, a
man some thirty-three years old, a dyer by trade, with a courageous but not
a criminal face. So I thought when, a little later, I secured his photograph
and measurements from the Criminal Identification Bureau for McClure’s
Magazine.
Ravachol began by blowing up various houses. It was like a tocsin. All
over France similar outrages followed, and they continued at intervals for
two or more years—the crowning one a bomb thrown in the Chamber of
Deputies in December of 1893 by a notorious anarchist known as Auguste
Vaillant. Several Deputies and eighty or more spectators in the gallery were
wounded seriously. It was a ghastly affair.
The outbreaks and the rumors of outbreaks as well as the actual
destruction had a bad effect on the nerves of many of the French. There was
Alphonse Daudet.
Madame Daudet had offered to get me a pensée for the collection I was
making for McClure’s Magazine, and arranged for me to call for the copy.
After we had tea she took me to the library to see how “Alphonse was
getting on.” It was my first glimpse of him: a little man, with a shock of
straight black hair which stood out rather ferociously at the moment,
evidently from running his fingers through it. His face was pale, his eyes
astonishingly black and bright. He had lost two or three teeth, and the
remaining ones were not very good. He was terribly excited. He had not
finished his pensée, he said, because he had just had a visit from an
anarchist. The servant had let in a man who had demanded twenty francs to
buy a wagonload of dynamite to blow up the Hôtel de Ville. He grew more
and more excited as he talked.
“I really expected the man to kill me,” he said, “and I got out this
revolver which I always keep in the drawer.” And he pulled it out to show it
to me. “A pretty affair,” he said, “if while you two were visiting in there a
tragedy had gone on in here.”
I so shared the general nervousness that, more than once when I saw a
man on the omnibus carrying a package, I feared a bomb and abruptly
descended; yet along with all my nervousness I was always nosing around,

hoping to see a bomb go off. It seemed to me that was my journalistic duty,
but I never saw anything more than the ruins they had caused. I did see a
pretty good revolution, one that had all the earmarks that I had been finding
in my attempted study of Revolution. It was in July of 1893. This time it
was youth in revolt, the youth of the Latin Quarter and the Beaux Arts.
From start to finish the revolt went on practically under my windows.
The Annual Ball of the Beaux Arts in the winter of 1893 had scandalized
Paris. As I remember, the exhibit which outraged was a lady who
promenaded with no other covering than a mosquito net. The protest finally
reached the Chamber of Deputies, where a member—Berenger—took it up
in a serious way and proposed a restrictive law which angered the students.
It was, they said, an interference with their right to amuse themselves.
Immediately long and picturesque monômes—single lines of men, one hand
on the shoulder of the man in front, the other grasping a hand of the one
behind—threaded their way up and down the boulevards, particularly in the
vicinity of the Luxembourg, chanting at the top of their voices, “Conspuez
Berenger!” “Conspuez Loze [Chief of Police]!” “Down with the puritans!”
The demonstration began on a Saturday, and that night a great crowd
centered in a café in my neighborhood. The place was packed inside and out
with youths noisier and noisier as the hours went on. Finally the crowd
became so unruly that a squadron of police charged them. There was a great
hubbub and in the mêlée somebody hurled one of the heavy white match
boxes which were used on all the tables in the Latin Quarter restaurants—a
dangerous missile. It hit an innocent spectator who had come to see the fun
—a young man of twenty-two or twenty-three from the other side of the
river—and killed him. The students were wild with rage, and all that night
and all next day they tore up and down the streets, pulling up trees,
knocking over kiosks, breaking windows.
The shopkeepers of Paris, having the experience of centuries of
revolutionary outbreaks behind them, knew when to retire; and before
Monday night the heavy wooden shutters with which they protect their
fronts were all up, their doors closed, and the Quarter was alive with
soldiers and mounted police. The center of the disturbance that day,
however, was not the Latin Quarter but the streets around the Chamber of
Deputies, where a great band of angry students kept up a tumult. There
were funny incidents. A big group of deputies came out to look over the

demonstration, and on the instant the air rang with the jingling of hundreds
of big copper sous pitched on the pavements to cries of “Panama, Panama.”
The Dahomans were pets of Paris in those days, a picturesque addition to
the population. Handsomer creatures never were seen. It happened a
carriageful, naked to the waist, attempted to pass through the crowd. At
once the students set up the cry, “Berenger, Berenger, bring ’em a figleaf,
bring ’em a figleaf.”
By Tuesday the Latin Quarter had begun to look sinister. The inevitable
had happened.
A popular disturbance never remains long in the full control of those who
start it. Advocates of all sorts of systems and causes join it, seize it, if one of
them can produce a real leader. A students’ revolt can easily become an
anarchist raid, with looting and arson on the side by professional
lawbreakers, who always come out of their hiding places when anarchy
breaks out. As the to-be-expected invasion of the Latin Quarter from
without began, destruction increased. Omnibuses were seized and, at
strategic points, piled up as barricades.
But the rioters never succeeded in making a stand. Steadily and quietly,
night and day, platoons of mounted police moved up and down the
boulevards and into the Quarter. I tried at first to go on my usual round,
hoping to learn something of revolutionary technique, but after I had been
caught in a crowd the cavalry was driving from the Place de la Sorbonne,
had heard bullets whistling over my head, been forced to take refuge in the
portal of the church, I was content to stay at home. However, there was
excitement enough there.
Our street was narrow and steep. When the cavalry charged, it would fill
up with the rioters. The movement was amazingly quiet—no shouting, no
shots, the only noise the clatter of the horses’ feet as they drove the mass
ahead.
This invasion of our street produced panic among the foreigners in the
house. There were a couple of middle-aged American women on the floor
below me out seeing the world; but they had not bargained for a Revolution,
and during the three or four days our Revolution was going on they shut
themselves night and day in their room.
The Egyptians were in a worse panic. They whispered horrible stories of
what happened in revolutions, and one night when fires had been set in our

neighborhood and the firemen were out, they were sure we were all going
to be burned alive. “Here we are, fourth floor,” cried one of them, “too high
up to get out. We’ll all be dead by morning.”
A week was as long as the students could hold out in the torrid weather.
There were too many cavalry, too many soldiers, too alert a police force,
and also there were the apaches, the anarchists. It was no longer their
revolution. They gave up; and by the end of the week kiosks were replaced,
trees replanted, windows and doors opened, and we were all going on in our
normal way.
Over, all quiet, nevertheless it was a pretty fine little revolution while it
lasted. Was it not like Ravachol and Vaillant, a symptom, the kind of
symptom by which the rise of the revolutionary fever always announces
itself? Were there those who would nourish these symptoms as carefully as
Madame Roland and her friends had nourished them in her day? If so, you
would get your explosion. And for what good, I was asking myself.
Madame Roland had lost her head because she was not content with a
first Revolution which had given the country a Constitution. She wanted to
get the King and Queen and the highborn of all varieties out of the way. She
wanted a Republic. She lost her head to those who were not satisfied with
getting King and Queen out of the way, who wanted her and her followers
out of the way as soon as they began to cry for order. Her Republic had
collapsed under Napoleon Bonaparte. There had come a return to the
Bourbon, then a Republic, then a return to a Bonaparte and again her
Republic. But was this corrupt and vulgar Republic I was hearing about any
better than the corrupt and scandalous court she hated and helped
overthrow? Was the affair of the diamond necklace any worse than the
affair of Panama? Was the Bastille a more ghastly prison than the spot
where they were now sending political prisoners—the Devil’s Island of the
Tropics?
I did not have the consolation of a fixed political formula to pull me out
of my muddle. It is very easy to put everything in its place when you have
that and are armed with its faith and its phrases. But here was I with a
heroine on my hands whose formula and methods and motives I was
beginning to question as I was questioning the formula, the methods and
motives of France of the moment.

What kept me at my task, prevented me from throwing up Madame
Roland and going on a blind research for the nature and roots of revolution,
was the brilliant and friendly intellectual circle into which my quest of
Madame Roland had led me.
Among the names I had been advised to include in my series on the
writing women of Paris was that of A. Mary F. Robinson, an Englishwoman
of the pre-Raphaelite school, a poetess of delicacy and distinction who had
married one of the eminent scholars of France, James Darmesteter, a
Hebrew and a cripple. One had only to look into his face to know that here
was a great soul. And what interested me so was that this something in his
face, his remarkable head, wiped out all sense of incongruity between the
mating of this slender and exquisite woman with this man of alien race and
crippled body. I never felt for a moment an incongruity.
When Monsieur Darmesteter learned I was after Madame Roland he was
immediately helpful. “You must know Léon Marillier of the Ecole des
Hautes Etudes. He is a great-great-grandson of Madame Roland. He has
papers which have never been given to the public. I will write you a letter.”
Which he did, a letter which brought me an invitation to dinner.
This dinner was the gate to a whole new social and intellectual world.
Here was a French academic household of the best sort, simple, hard-
working, gay. Léon Marillier was an excellent and respected scholar.
Jeanne, his wife, a sister of the Breton poet, Anatole Le Braz, was not only
a skillful household manager but, like the wives of many French scholars,
her husband’s amanuensis, copy and proof reader, and general adviser. She
had particular charm among Parisians, for she was a Bretonne who loved
her pays and kept its distinguishing marks without being provincial. Here I
found, too, eager to go over the papers which Léon Marillier spread out
after dinner for my inspection, one who was to prove a most helpful and
delightful friend, Charles Borgeaud the eminent Swiss scholar, a friend of
my friends the Vincents now back at Johns Hopkins.
But this was not the end of it. There was a closer connection, Léon
Marillier’s mother, the great-granddaughter of Madame Roland, and they
quickly passed me on to her.
Here again I was invited to dinner, and here I discovered a circle different
from anything I had ever known, a household of brilliant men presided over
by Madame Marillier, a most gracious woman, of fine intelligence, freed

and mellowed by a tragic life, as I was to learn. More than any woman I
have ever known, Madame Marillier came to stand in my mind and heart as
the personification of that quality which the French hold so high—bonté.
The leader of the group of men was a Sorbonne professor of history—
Charles Seignobos. He was a learned man who carried his learning not as
an accomplishment but as a social utility. Seignobos was a not too dogmatic
socialist and materialist, a good pianist, a marvelous talker, a lovable and
pungent personality. Around him there gathered every Wednesday evening
for dinner at Madame Marillier’s table a number of young men—all serious
students, liberal minds, hard workers. After dinner six or eight more
habitués of the house were sure to drop in for coffee and for talk.
Among these regular habitués was Lucien Herr, who at that moment was
seeking to convert to socialism the two men who in the years since have
done most to make the doctrine an impregnable factor in political life in
France—Jean Jaurès and Léon Blum, the recent premier of France. Herr at
that time was the librarian at the Ecole Normale, as well as managing editor
of the Revue de Paris. In both positions he met many young would-be
scholars and writers. When one of them seemed to him to have the makings
of a liberal thinker he worked over him as a missionary works to save a
soul. He was so working in the early nineties over Jean Jaurès and Léon
Blum.
Occasionally Lucien Herr brought to the Seignobos circle one of those
whom he was seeking to convert. If Jaurès and Blum were ever among
them they made no particular impression on me, much as I dislike to think
so. They were simply a couple of Lucien’s young men.
Although Herr believed the socialistic state he sought would and could
come by a peaceful evolution, the thing I remember best about him was an
exhibit of indifference to bloodshed which shocked me to the core. The
night that Vaillant threw the bomb in the Chamber of Deputies the group
was dining with Madame Marillier; Lucien was late, not an unusual
happening. We were halfway through when he came in, pale, exalted. We
all turned in our seats as he standing told us how he had been in the
Chamber when the bomb was thrown, of the explosion in mid-air, of the
wounded all about him. He had no word of the suffering, only of the
political bearings of the deed.

“But the wounded, Lucien,” broke in Seignobos, who could not endure
the thought of pain.
“Cela ne me fait rien,” said Lucien.
His opposition to bloodshed was intellectual, not emotional like that of
Seignobos.
On the face of it nobody could have been less at home in such a group
than I, a tongue-tied alien, all eyes and ears, contributing nothing but my
presence; yet it came about before many weeks that “Mademoiselle Mees,”
as Seignobos called me, had a place at the weekly dinners. Undoubtedly the
friendship that sprang up quickly between Madame Marillier and me, as
well as the fact that I asked nothing but to listen, explained it. I could afford
to listen; I had never heard such talk. There was nothing on earth that was
foreign or forbidden. Opinions were free as the air, but they had to fight for
their lives. There was a complete absence of pretense, and sophistry was
thrown as soon as it came to its feet. That it was a friendly circle, its
acceptance of me was proof enough.
Friendliness began at the door when I arrived Wednesday evening. It was
always Seignobos who came rushing to meet me, seized my hand, helped
me off with my wraps, danced about me asking eager boyish questions
about what I had been doing since I was there last. The talk begun, I was
forgotten unless by chance he suddenly recalled me. Then he would jump
up, run over, demand, “What do you think of that?” Half the time I was
thinking less about what they were saying than about their exciting
personalities. They seemed to be vividly related to life, but much of their
talk was based on something that was not life—abstract literature, learning,
speculation. I realized this when they talked of America. Seignobos saw it
only as he had read about it in books. It seemed to him not to be producing
that intellectual élite on which he felt the salvation of society depended—a
group capable of doing the thinking and planning for a world of lesser men.
It was the lesser men who were coming to the top in America. Confronted
with superiority from America, he refused to believe it native. One summer
I presented to him a friend of mine, a woman of exquisite mind and manner.
“She is not American?” he said. “They do not produce that kind in America.
Where was she born—where was she educated?”
“In Kansas,” I said. He bounded out of his chair like a ball. “It couldn’t
be, it couldn’t be. Kansas is only a half-settled state. One has only to look to

see this is a rare type that you have brought here. She never came out of
Kansas.”
I never saw him more outraged than one day when pressure was brought
to bear on him to accept a position in the University of Chicago at a
handsome salary. Jumping up, he raced around the room. “Chicago! What
can a man of intelligence find there? You can’t build an intellectual center
on money and organization. It is a growth. Five hundred years from now
Chicago may be fit for scholars, but not now.”
He mistrusted the intelligence of the United States, but less than that of
England. Americans were not stupid: Englishmen were. He wanted none of
them in his circle. I met this prejudice head-on when I asked permission to
introduce to him a brilliant young English friend, H. Wickham Steed.
I had never known a young man who was surer of what he wanted to do
in life or who was preparing for it in a more thorough and logical fashion
than Steed. His ambition was to become a foreign correspondent of the
London Times. He knew that for this it was necessary for him to be familiar
with the languages, the history, the men, the politics of the leading countries
of the Continent. He began by taking some two years in Germany. Now he
was acquainting himself with the French language, literature, politics,
leaders. I found Steed especially interesting on a subject of which I knew
little, although we were having reverberations in the United States. This
was the philosophy of Karl Marx. Steed was familiar with its then status in
Germany, knew its leaders—Liebknecht and Engels. He envied me my
relations with the group at Madame Marillier’s, envied me my Wednesday
night dinner, as he might very well.
“Could you not present me?” he asked.
I knew how jealous they were of their circle, and knew, too, they thought
the English a stupid bigoted race and wanted none of it. But Steed was
certainly not stupid. Besides, he was young, and I had a feeling that nothing
would be better for him than contact with these enlightened friends of mine.
And so with some hesitation I told Seignobos about him and asked him if I
might bring him.
“Never! The English are stupid.”
“You are wrong about Steed,” I argued. “You ought to be willing to give
him the benefit of the doubt.”

After some arguments I was allowed to present my protégé. As I
expected, they pounced on him mercilessly. It was fine to see the way he
held his own and a relief when, after an hour or more of baiting, Seignobos
came to my corner and in a tone of surprise and wonder said,
“Mademoiselle Mees, your Englishman is intelligent.”
When they came to that conclusion they took Steed in, and from that time
on he was welcome. All through the years of his brilliant career as a
correspondent and later through the war as foreign editor of the London
Times, the association with Seignobos continued. In his recollections,
“Through Thirty Years,” Steed tells of his introduction to the circle—“a sort
of entrance examination” which convinced his examiners he was less stupid
than he ought to have been.
This then was the group in which my interest in Madame Roland had
landed me. As the weeks went on, the intimacy grew greater. Whatever
occurred to them that might help me in my work, they suggested. It was
through their introduction that I was given every opportunity in the
manuscript room of the National Library to work over the large collection
of Roland manuscripts which had just been catalogued. Indeed, I was the
first person to work on them in the Library.
Delightful as well as important to my enterprise was the invitation
Madame gave me in the spring of 1893 to go with her for a fortnight to Le
Clos, a country estate which had been in the Roland family for at least a
hundred years before the Revolution. After the death of Monsieur and
Madame Roland in 1793 Le Clos had passed to their daughter. It now
belonged to Madame Marillier, who managed it, giving special care to its
chief yield, grapes—made into wine on the place.
Le Clos lay in the Beaujolais, some thirty miles north of the city of Lyons
and close to a hamlet called Theizé. Here Madame Roland had spent some
four years while her husband served as inspector of manufactures at Lyons.
The château was little changed, so Madame Marillier told me. The activities
were what they had been a hundred years ago. It was a rare chance to see
my heroine in a different role, busy with other duties than those of student,
tuft-hunter, political diplomat, Providence to a Nation. I needed to see her in
a more natural and helpful environment, for I was beginning to mistrust her.
The journey to Le Clos with Madame Marillier, taken in May, was an
adventure for both of us. How much she had jeopardized her position in her

own family by traveling with a foreigner and a Protestant, I did not realize
until the day we spent sightseeing at Dijon. She left me for an hour to visit
an important and ancient aunt. “I should not dare take you with me,” she
said, “my aunt would cast me out if she knew I was traveling with a
heretic.”
To reach Le Clos we left the railroad at Villefranche and climbed in a
horse-cart for an hour and more, steadily up hills, across valleys, a high
broad country, striped by many colored ribbonlike farms, dotted by stout
buildings of dull yellow, the stone of the country, sprinkled with splendid
trees, vineyards and orchards. Theizé, the hamlet we sought, lay high. We
drove between its walls, turned into a lane, and stopped before a big gate in
a yellow wall. Behind it lay Le Clos, a little white château of Louis XIV’s
time with corner towers and red-tiled roofs, a court on one side, a garden on
the other. From this garden one looked out over a magnificent panorama of
hills, mountains, valleys, stretching to the Swiss Alps in the east. On clear
evenings the snowcaps were visible and now and then the round crown of
Mount Blanc glowed on the sky line like an immense opal.
Within the château there had been little outward change from Madame
Roland’s time. There was the same great dark kitchen, with its stone floor,
its huge fireplace (although now a stove helped out), the same shining
copper vessels on the walls. There was the same brick floor in the billiard
room with its ancient table, its guns and caps of successive generations of
soldiers on the walls. The brightest place within the house was the salon,
done in yellow plush, family portraits on the walls, a piano, books.
I had an apartment to myself looking out on the garden and beyond to the
mountains: a bedroom, toilet and workroom, severe as a nun’s cell with its
uncovered floor, its unadorned walls, but containing every necessary
comfort and a wealth of books—five hundred or more in my workroom,
including several magnificent sets. Among them, Voltaire complete in
seventy volumes. They nearly all bore eighteenth century dates, and some
of them the name of Roland himself. Indeed, the home was rich in books of
value. In Madame Marillier’s library there were two thousand or more; but
these were only “what was left.” From the collection she had inherited she
had given Léon Marillier complete early sets of Voltaire, Rousseau,
Diderot; she had made a collection of scientific books for Louis Lapique,
one of the members of her Paris household, and another of historical books

for Charles Seignobos, and still there were all these hundreds, many of
which I had the right to believe Madame Roland herself had handled. We
ransacked them for marginal notes and hunted through the drawers of old
desks and bureaus for papers, finding not a few small bits which were grist
for my mill.
Books were about all the original possessions of Le Clos that the
Revolutionists of the seventeen-nineties had not made away with. The
château itself had not suffered seriously, though there were still some slight
scars; but, books aside, it had been completely stripped of furnishings. Even
today, so Madame Marillier told me, it was not unusual when inquiry was
made about the origin of some interesting old piece in a Beaujolais
farmhouse to be told, “Oh, that came from Le Clos a hundred years ago.”
The Revolution stripped Le Clos of its possessions and all but ended the
family. But it did not succeed in convincing all the Beaujolais of its
beneficence. There was not a little outspoken antirevolutionary feeling still
abroad. The Marseillaise was never played in Theizé, I was told. The curé
and the municipal council would not permit it, nor would they allow the
14th of July to be celebrated. While I was at Le Clos there was a sharp
dispute in a neighboring hamlet on the playing of the “Marseillaise.” The
bandmaster refused to lead when it was asked. It was put up to the band
who voted yes. Thereupon the master laid down his baton and went off in a
huff. Madame Roland’s Revolution was not ended.
But I did not think much of such dark matters at Le Clos. They did not
belong to the years I had come there to relive. Those were only gay, happy,
useful years. I knew from her letters before me she could and did fill the
role of a local Providence, adjusting her activities and reforms to what her
constituency understood and was willing to accept. She filled her time as I
saw my friend Madame Marillier filling hers, busy from morning until night
with the affairs of the estate, visiting the people, prescribing remedies for
man and beast, vegetables and vines, arranging a marriage for this pair,
making an invalid more comfortable, taking care of some peasant’s
wayward son, climbing up the steep hillside to early mass to set a good
example, discharging naturally and intelligently that responsibility to the
family, the estate, the dependent countryside, which the Frenchwoman
seems to accept as her contribution to the state. It makes her something

steady, wise, superior, a strong factor in the economic, social, and religious
stability of France.
I had never seen anything which seemed to me more useful than what
Madame Marillier was doing, and I had opportunity to judge, for
everywhere she went she took me with her. Her invariable card of
introduction to these natural-born skeptics of the value of all persons not
born and raised in France was, “Mademoiselle comes from the same
country as your vines.” That was enough for them. Their vines had been
devastated by repeated visitations of the phylloxera, and it was not until the
introduction of American roots that the vineyards had recovered. They were
looking well now. I was welcome at once; they treated me as if I were the
benefactor, yet I doubt if any of them knew where America was. Most of
them with whom I talked placed it somewhere in Africa. Africa they did
know, as a name at least, because many of their sons went there for military
service. One of the most surprising things to me among the French, high
and low, was their utter indifference to the geography of the rest of the
world. Why should they bother about the rest of the world? There was only
one land about which they should know: that was France, and that they
should know to the last corner. Even many educated people I met did not
distinguish North from South America. In Madame Darmesteter’s drawing
room I met cultivated people who believed that all Americans carried
weapons in their pockets, and that Indians walked the streets of Chicago.
When I protested that it was against the law to carry a revolver, and that the
only Indians in Chicago were those that were imported as they imported the
Dahomans, they smiled incredulously.
Many of them, I concluded, got their notions of what America was like
from the exhibits in a certain public hall on the Grand Boulevards. Here you
paid a sou or two to look through stereoscopes at amusing and sometimes
very improper pictures. Here the walls were decorated with illustrated
newspapers from different countries, and among them were always copies
of the Police Gazette. As a matter of fact it was in this hall of the Grand
Boulevard of Paris that I saw the first copy of the Police Gazette that I had
seen since those days back in Rouseville when my friend and I carefully
studied the underworld in the sheets that we could slip away from the
bunkhouse of my father’s workmen.

The visit to Le Clos with its grist of impressions, the conviction that I had
seen Madame Roland herself, in her happiest as well as her most useful
days, completed the study of source material for her life on which I had
been working as I found time through the twenty months I had been in
Paris. It rounded out the woman she was, softened the asperity which I was
beginning to feel for her; also it strengthened my suspicion that while a
woman frequently was a success as the Providence of a countryside she did
no better than a man when she attempted to fill that function for a nation.
Now I was ready to write my book. Of course while I was doing this I
must keep the wolf from the door, and it was not so easy in the year 1893
for a stray journalist in Paris to get out of the distracted American market
orders or pay for orders. The depression of the nineties, now in its third year
with five years more to go, was working havoc everywhere. It was hard to
get your money even if your debtors consented you had earned it. I was
depending at the moment largely upon the new magazine, McClure’s. It had
started in the summer of 1893, an undertaking which only the young and
innocent and the hopelessly optimistic would ever have dared. It has always
been a marvel to me that Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips were able to hold on
through that dreadful year; but they did, and with a resourcefulness, even
gaiety, that nobody but those who saw it can appreciate.
I knew perfectly well that if the magazine lived I should get all the
money I earned, but in the summer of 1893 they did not have it. It came to a
serious pass with me, a point where I did not have a sou or anybody to
whom I could confide my predicament. Not for the world would I have told
my devoted Madame Marillier that there was no money in my purse; not for
the world would I have confided it to Madame A; and, as for the Americans
on the scene, I was bent on impressing them with the fact I was really
getting on. At all events it must not go back to Titusville or Meadville,
Pennsylvania, that this questionable venture of mine had brought me so low.
And so one warm summer day I took my sealskin coat, which really was
a very good one quite out of keeping with the rest of my wardrobe—by this
time close to scandalous—I took the coat and marched over town to the
Mont de Piété. They were polite to me; but I was a foreigner, that coat
might be stolen, probably was. What credentials did I have, whom could I
give as reference? There was nobody in the town that I was willing to have
know what I was doing. But did I have documents to prove my identity?

Yes, I said, I had; and I would bring them. So I left my coat and raced
back to the Left Bank for my credentials. And what were they? What did I
have? There were letters from my publishers; there was my checkbook—
exhausted but nevertheless a checkbook. Without thinking it would be of
any particular use I took my Allegheny College diploma. The inspector
passed lightly over the letters of editors, the stubs in my checkbook, but the
diploma impressed him; and so it was on my Allegheny College diploma I
made the loan which helped me over the bad months of 1893 while I was
waiting for a check from a land in the grip of one of the most serious money
famines that it had ever known.
Although there might be anxious moments over money I was freer to
work on my book than I had ever been. And work I did, as hard as I could,
all that terrifically hot summer. My friend Madame Marillier had gone to
Brittany. She begged me to come along; but I had used up all my vacation
money in my trip to Le Clos—a trip I had extended to Switzerland and to a
chain of French towns where there were beautiful things I wanted to see, to
Bourg, Mâcon, Cluny, Autun. There was nothing that I wanted to do more
except finish up and go home.
But the finishing up was not so easy. I had undertaken the study of this
woman in order to clear up my mind about the quality of service that
women could give and had given in public life, particularly in times of
stress. I had hoped to come out with some definite conclusions, to be able to
say: “The woman at this point will be a steady, intuitive, dependable force.
She will never lend herself to purely emotional or political approaches to
great social problems; she knows too much of human beings. Her business
has always been handling human beings. Building families has been her job
in society. You can depend upon her to tell you whom to trust, whom to
follow, whom to discard. These intuitions of hers about people are born of
centuries of intimate first-hand dealing with human beings from babyhood
on—they are among the world’s greatest values. And she will be no party to
violence. She knows that solutions are only worked out by patient
cooperation, and that cooperation must be kindly. She knows the danger of
violence in the group as she knows the danger of selfishness. She has been
the world’s greatest sufferer from these things, and she has suffered them in
order that she might protect that thing which is her business in the world,
the bearing and the rearing of children. She has a great inarticulate wisdom
born of her experience in the world. That is the thing women will give.”

That was what I had hoped to find Madame Roland giving; and I had
found a politician with a Providence complex. I had also found what I had
been trying to shove aside, as women do, new proof of that eternal and
necessary natural law that the woman backs up her man. Madame Roland
had been Royalist, Republican, Revolutionist, according to the man she
loved. She had served her man with unyielding conviction, would not
temper or cooperate, intolerant, inflexible.
But what woman in America seeking the vote as a sure cure for injustice
and corruption would listen to such a message? That, of course, was no
affair of mine. My affair was clearing my own mind. So far I had only
succeeded in adding to its confusion, even in destroying faiths I had held.
There was the ancient faith that you could depend upon the woman to
oppose violence. This woman had been one of the steadiest influences to
violence, willing, even eager, to use this terrible revolutionary force, so
bewildering and terrifying to me, to accomplish her ends, childishly
believing herself and her friends strong enough to control it when they
needed it no longer.
The heaviest blow to my self-confidence so far was my loss of faith in
revolution as a divine weapon. Not since I discovered the world not to have
been made in six days of twenty-four hours each, had I been so
intellectually and spiritually upset. I had held a revolution as a noble and
sacred instrument, destroying evil and leaving men free to be wise and good
and just. Now it seemed to me not something that men used, but something
that used men for its own mysterious end and left behind the same relative
proportion of good and evil as it started with.
Never did I so realize my ignorance of life and men and society as in the
summer of 1894, when I packed up the manuscript of my life of Madame
Roland to take it back to America for its final revision in the peace of my
home.
Of course, I told myself, I would go through with it. I would put down
what I had found as nearly as I could, even if I had not got what I came for.
And then came the question, Can I get what I came for? Is it to be found—
the real answer to my question about woman in society, the point or
position where she can best serve it? Can I find an answer to this other
question that has so disturbed me—the nature of revolution? Apparently, I
told myself, as I packed my bag finally to go back to America, you have

only begun; but at least you have a new starting point. Cheer up, make a
new plan. And I was making a new plan. I had been making one for some
time. It was laid down economically, professionally, and socially with as
much precision as the plan with which I had come to Paris in 1891. It was a
plan for my return to Paris.
I would go home, get my book into shape, try to convince the Scribners
that it was worth their publishing. I would get a good long visit with my
family, the only thing I felt now to be worth while in life. I wanted to be
sure they were there, that the house was there, that my father’s chair stood
by the living-room center table under the drop gas reading light, that the
family Sunday dinner was what it had always been. I wanted to hear my
father ask the blessing at the table, to sit with my sister and mother
afternoons out on the shady side of the lawn. I wanted all the home flowers
I could gather—and it was queer what a big place flowers took in my
dreams of home. My mother was one of those women for whom, they say,
“anything will grow.” And she had had flowers, summer and winter. One of
the deprivations of not having money in Paris had been that I could not buy
flowers. I had to content myself with lounging around the flower markets
on the Square of Notre Dame. I lingered there almost as much as I did over
the bookstalls along the Seine. But at home I could gather all I wanted.
I would come back to France on different terms. My friendly publishers
would give me work. I had schemes for books and articles which I felt sure
would interest the Scribners, that history of women, for instance. Then there
was this lively, friendly, aggressive, delightful McClure’s. There were
plenty of things I could write for them.
I would take an apartment in the Latin Quarter up high where I could
look over the roofs, see the sky. I would have a salon like Madame
Marillier’s. She would find me a bonne à tout faire, and I could have people
in to dinner—Madame Marillier, Seignobos, and perhaps Lucien Herr and
Louis Lapique and Charles Borgeaud would come. The summer would
bring over my precious American friends—the Vincents, Emerys, Hazens,
and my sister must join me. Life would be full and satisfying while I
cleared up my mind on women and revolution and continued my search for
God in the great cathedrals.
It was with this baggage and a terrible thirst for a long drink of family
life that in June, 1894, I said “Au revoir” to my friends. I felt so sure it was

Au revoir.
The first two months after I reached America I spent at home convincing
myself that my family in spite of the trials it had been suffering was
unchanged in its ways, its loyalties, and its philosophy. If life was not as
easy materially for my father and mother as their long years of labor and
self-denial gave them the right to hope, I found that they were enjoying that
most precious experience, the evidence of the continuity of their lives. My
brother and his fine wife with their children, two girls and a boy, lived only
a few doors away, and the grandchildren were as much in one home as in
the other. They gave, I found, a continual fresh zest to the household and its
doings. My father again had the legitimate excuse for going to the circus
which our growing up had taken from him: “The children want to go.” My
mother had as strong a justification for family picnics and birthday
celebrations on which she tired herself out: “The children enjoy them so.”
For me those children were a challenging experience. Three years had
made the youngsters keen observers, and I found them appraising me in the
fashion of natural unspoiled children. Launched on one of the long narrative
monologues to which I am addicted with intimates I would suddenly be
checked by the cool impersonal stare of nieces or nephew. They did not
know they were doing it, but I knew they were taking my measure. They
were not only an unending interest and joy to me but a salutary correction,
as they have continued to be to this day.
But before I was really sure of my standing with them, though quite
reassured as to that with their elders, and just as I had put the finishing
touches to my Madame Roland, I was snatched away from Titusville by a
hurried letter from Mr. McClure. I must come at once to New York and
write a life of Napoleon Bonaparte.

8
THE NAPOLEON MOVEMENT OF THE
NINETIES

When I reached New York I found that the situation behind the hasty call
to come on and write a life of Napoleon was pressing. The Napoleon
Movement, which I had been following in Paris for two years, had reached
the editorial desk of McClure’s Magazine in the form of a permission to
reproduce a large and choice collection of Napoleon portraits, the property
of a distinguished citizen of Washington, D.C.—Gardiner Green Hubbard.
Mr. Hubbard was popularly known as the father-in-law of Alexander
Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone. He was as well the father-in-
law of the telephone since it was largely through his faith in the invention
before it was recognized as a practical utility, and his shrewd and
indefatigable work in securing patents, in enlisting supporters, and in
fighting rival claimants, that the telephone had been developed and secured
for Mr. Bell and his family.
Mr. Hubbard had long been a Napoleon collector. The revival of interest
in the man in the early nineties had made him feel that his collection ought
to be reproduced for the public. But he insisted a suitable text—that is, one
he liked—must go with the pictures. Mr. McClure had secured something
well written from an able Englishman, Robert Sherard, a great-grandson of
Wordsworth; but it was so contemptuously anti-Napoleon that Mr. Hubbard
would not allow his pictures to go with it. And here it was August, and Mr.
McClure with the headlong speed in which he conducted affairs had
announced the first installment for November.
I was both amazed and amused by the idea that a popular American
magazine would think of such an undertaking. Why? I asked myself. I had

seen the Napoleon Movement start and grow in Paris in 1892 and 1893. I
had read everything that came along in the way of fresh reminiscences, of
brilliant journalism, particularly that of Figaro, and I had tucked away in
my clippings a full set of the Caran d’Ache cartoons which so captivated
Paris; but I looked on the Movement as political, an effort of the
Bonapartists to revive the popular admiration for the country’s most
spectacular figure. If the revulsion against the Panama brand of
republicanism could be kept alive, fed, might there not be a turning to
Bonaparte? Just as the anarchists took advantage of the situation by hurling
bombs, so the Bonapartists turned to blazoning France with the stories of
the glory that had been hers under the Little Corporal. It is an amazing
record of achievement, and one had to be a poor Frenchman, or poor human
being for that matter, not to feel his blood stir at its magnificence.
But write a life of Napoleon Bonaparte? It was laughable. And yet how
could I refuse to try?
In passing through New York in June I had given Mr. McClure the right
to call upon me, promising to join his staff after my vacation. He would
give me forty dollars a week—more money than I had ever expected to
earn. With care I could save enough to carry me back to Paris, and at the
same time I could learn more of the needs of the McClure organization.
The forty dollars a week was a powerful argument. Moreover, I had been
talking largely about devoting myself to French Revolutionary history. If
this wasn’t that, what was? But there was something else. This man had
pulled France out of the slough where she lay when Madame Roland lost
her head. I had a terrific need of seeing the thing through, France on her
feet. Napoleon had for a time set her there and brought back decency, order,
common sense.
I would try, I told Mr. McClure, at his expense, but I should have to go
back at once to Paris. Where else could I get sufficient material? That idea
of getting to Paris encouraged me to try, but first we all agreed I must go to
Washington and talk with Mr. Hubbard, look over the collection. Promptly
an invitation came from Mrs. Hubbard to come at once to their summer
home out Chevy Chase way on Woodley Lane not far from the Rock Creek
Zoo. President and Mrs. Cleveland had their summer home on the Lane,
and the Maclean place, where Admiral Dewey was to go when he returned
the conquering hero from the Philippines, was across the way. Twin Oaks,

as the Hubbard place was called from two big oaks just in front of the
house, was the finest country estate in the Washington district, as well as the
most beautiful home into which I had ever been admitted. Mrs. Hubbard
herself was a woman of rare taste and cultivation, a really great lady, and
what she was showed from end to end of that lovely sunny house. Maids,
butler, gardener, all took on something of her dignity and gentleness.
Mr. Hubbard was a man of some seventy years then, wiry, energetic,
putting in every moment of his time serving his friends and family and in
worshiping Mrs. Hubbard. I think he tried her preference for quiet and
dignity and for people of her own kind. It must have made her a little
uneasy to have a strange woman with a meager wardrobe and a preoccupied
mind drop into her carefree, gaily bedecked society; but she took it all in the
best nature and with unvarying kindness and understanding. I liked her
particularly for the way she accepted Mr. McClure in the days to come. He
would burst unexpectedly into the house at any moment which suited his
convenience, his bag loaded with proofs of the Napoleon prints, and almost
before he had made his greeting the bag was open and the proofs spread
helter-skelter over the carpet. Being very much on my good behavior I was
a little horrified myself, and then I did so want them to like and appreciate
Mr. McClure. When I tried to apologize for the dishevelment he wrought
Mrs. Hubbard laughed. “That eagerness of his is beautiful,” she said, “I am
accustomed to geniuses.” And so she was, as I was to find.
It did not take me long to discover that there was plenty of material in
Washington for the Napoleon sketch. Mr. Hubbard had the latest books and
pamphlets. It was easy to arrange that I have proofs from Paris of two or
three volumes of reminiscences that had been announced. In the State
Department I found the full Napoleonic correspondence published by the
order of the French Government. Files of all the leading French newspapers
of the period were in one library or another. In the Congressional Library
there was a remarkable collection of books gathered by Andrew D. White
when he was minister to Germany from 1879 to 1881, the bulk of them in
German, French, and English. An item of this collection not to be
duplicated was some fifty volumes of pamphlets in several different
languages made in Germany during the Revolution and covering the
Napoleonic era. They were for the most part the hasty agitated outbreaks of
vox populi—protests, arguments, prophecies, curious personal adventures—
but among them were rare bits. Taken as a whole they reflected the

contemporary state of mind of the people of Europe as did nothing I had
ever seen.
Convinced of the adequacy of material, I reluctantly gave up Paris and
settled down to work in the Congressional Library. It was not so easy to
find a writing table there in the early nineties, and it took some persuasion
to convince the ruler of the place, Ainsworth Spofford, that I was worth the
effort, that is that I was there to use his books day in and day out until my
task was done. Certain of that, he tucked me in, though stacks of books
rising from floor to ceiling had to be moved to find room.
I wonder if students in the United States know how much they owe to
this man. He gave his life to making a library first to serve Congress, for he
held the firm conviction that Congressmen generally needed educating, and
that books handy in which he could find materials for their committee work
and their speeches would contribute to the process. He made it his first
business to provide them as near on the instant as possible with what he
thought they needed. In return for this service he used every opportunity to
wheedle, shame, beg money from them, money for books, equipment, an
increased staff, and always for better accommodations; for Mr. Spofford
had a great vision of a national library, educating not only Congress but the
people. To realize that vision he had become what he was when I knew him,
a devoted, domineering, crabbed czar of his realm. He worked incessantly,
doing everything, knowing everything. He paid little attention to the
irritated criticisms of those who saw only the inconveniences and dust and
overcrowding of the old rooms, and who charged him with inefficiency and
tyranny. His mind was on the arrangement and administration of the marble
pile already under way across the square. This was what he had been
working for—a worthy place for books. His sharp, irritated, “There, maybe
you can find something in that,” banging a dusty volume on my table, has
often sounded in my ears as in later years I worked at the commodious
desks of the library he had dreamed, and which to my mind is a monument
to him more than to any other man—naturally enough since he was the only
man I ever knew who had anything to do with its existence.
Six weeks, and I had my first installment ready. I had done it with my
tongue in my cheek. Impudence, it seemed to me, to write biography on the
gallop. I had kept myself to it by repeating in moments of disgust: “Well, a
cat may look at a king. I’ll sketch it in, and they can take or leave it.” But

Mr. Hubbard liked what I had done, and that meant Mr. McClure hurried it
to the printers while I in hot haste went ahead with my sketching.
I expected nothing for myself from it more than the forty dollars a week,
and the inner satisfaction of following the thrilling drama from the terror of
’93 down to St. Helena. That satisfied me. But to my surprise I did get the
last thing in the world I had expected, the approval of a few people who
knew the field. John C. Ropes wrote me he liked the treatment: “Come and
lunch with me when you are in Boston and see my Napoleon collection.” I
couldn’t believe my eyes. Of course I went.
Charles Bonaparte, the grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, and Mrs.
Bonaparte invited Mr. Hubbard and me to lunch with them in Baltimore to
see their collection. Curious the little things one remembers of long-ago
experiences! Out of that visit I recall only that Mrs. Bonaparte told me that
in the garret when she came into the house where Jerome and his American
wife, Elizabeth Patterson, had lived, there were literally barrels of string,
short lengths neatly rolled, accumulated by the sister-in-law of Napoleon.
Why remember that when the home was full of treasures on my subject?
Probably because I have never been able to throw away a string without a
pang.
Something better worth remembering was the startling resemblance to
Napoleon in a certain pose of Charles Bonaparte. As he stood talking
unconsciously, hands behind his back, slightly stooped, he was the
counterpart of Raffet’s Napoleon, the most natural of them all.
A bit of consolation for my hasty work came from the last source I would
have expected: William Milligan Sloane, the author of an elaborate study,
the outcome of years of research, recently published by the Century
Magazine. That was the way biography should be written, I told myself:
years of research, of note-taking, of simmering and saturation. Then you
had a ripened result. I said something of this once to Mr. Sloane.
“I am not so sure,” he replied, “that all the time you want to take, all the
opportunity to indulge your curiosity and run here and there on bypaths, to
amuse yourself, to speculate and doubt, contribute to the soundness or value
of a biography. I have often wished that I had had, as you did, the prod of
necessity behind me, the obligation to get it out at a fixed time, to put it
through, no time to idle, to weigh, only to set down. You got something that
way—a living sketch.”

I couldn’t have listened to more consoling comment. There must have
been something in his characterization of “living,” for now, over forty years
since it first appeared in book form, I still receive annually a small royalty
check for my “pot-boiling” Napoleon!
What really startled me about that sketch was the way it settled things for
me, knocked over my former determinations, and went about shaping my
outward life in spite of me. It weakened my resolve never again to tie
myself to a position, to keep myself entirely footloose; it shoved Paris into
the future and substituted Washington. It was certainly not alone a return to
the security of a monthly wage, with the possibility that the wage would
soon grow, that turned my plans topsy-turvy, though that had its influence.
Chiefly it was the sense of vitality, of adventure, of excitement, that I was
getting from being admitted on terms of equality and good comradeship
into the McClure crowd.
The “Napoleon” had given the magazine, now in its second year, the
circulation boost it needed. My part in it was not exaggerated by the office
or by me. We all agreed that it was the pictures that had done it, but the text
had framed the pictures, helped bring out their value, and it had been done
at a critical moment.
The success of the “Napoleon” sketch did me a good turn with the
Scribners, who had had my manuscript of “Madame Roland” for some time.
They were hesitating about publishing it. There was no popular appeal. I
was entirely unknown, but the “Napoleon” work gave me sufficient backing
to persuade them. At least that was the explanation the literary head of the
concern, William C. Brownell, gave me. Thus my first book was my second
to appear. My reward for writing it came from my interest in doing it, what
I learned about how to go at a serious biographical study, certainly not in
royalties. My first check was for forty-eight cents. I had used up my share
of the small sales in corrections of the proofs and gift copies.
I must stay with them, declared Mr. McClure. And the more I saw of Mr.
McClure and his colleagues, the more I wanted to stay. Of my first
impression of S. S. McClure in Paris I have spoken. Closer views
emphasized and enlarged that impression. He was as eager as a dog on the
hunt—never satisfied, never quiet. Creative editing, he insisted, was not to
be done by sitting at a desk in a comfortable office. It was only done in the
field following scents, hunts. An omnivorous reader of newspapers,

magazines, books, he came to his office primed with ideas, possibilities,
and there was always a chance that among them was a stroke of genius. He
hated nothing so much in the office as settled routine, wanted to feel stir
from the door to the inner sanctum. And he had great power to stir
excitement by his suggestions, his endless searching after something new,
alive, startling, and particularly by his reporting.
He stood in awe of no man, but dashed back and forth over the country,
back and forth to Europe interviewing the great and mighty. He brought
back from his forays contracts with Stevenson, Conan Doyle, Anthony
Hope, Kipling. It was something to find yourself between the covers of a
book printing a Jungle story. They all came out in McClure’s in those years
and were followed by “Captains Courageous” and “Stalky” as well as many
of the greatest of the short stories and poems—“The Ship That Found
Herself,” “The Destroyers,” the “Recessional”—things that left you
breathless and gave to a number the touch of genius for which the office
searched and sweated.
Mr. McClure was always peering over the Edge of the Future. It was this
search for what was on the way that brought to McClure’s the first article in
an American magazine on radium, the X-ray, Marconi’s wireless,
Lilienthal’s and Octave Chanute’s gliders, Langley’s steam-driven air-
runner and in time the first article on the Wrights’ flying machine.
In my field of biography and history the Edge of the Future meant to Mr.
McClure the “unpublished” or the so poorly published that its reappearance
was equal to a first appearance. The success of a feature spurred him to
effort to get more of it, things which would sharpen and perpetuate the
interest. He was ready to look into any suggestion, however unlikely it
might seem to the cautious-minded. He was never afraid of being fooled,
only of missing something.
His quick taking of a hint, his warm reception of new ideas, new facts,
had its drawbacks. If they were dramatic and stirring Mr. McClure was
impatient of investigation. He wanted the fun of seeing his finds quickly in
print. At one point in the publication of the Napoleon he caused me real
anxiety by his apparent determination to print a story for which I could find
no authority.
Among the contributors to the Syndicate at that time was a picturesque
European with a title and an apparently endless flow of gossip. He

pretended to have been a member of the Court of Napoleon III and in the
confidence of the Emperor. This relation accounted for his having been
invited to join a strange secret party made up by the Emperor, who was
worried over a rumor that the body of Napoleon I did not lie under the
dome of the Invalides. It was not known who did lie there or what had
become of Napoleon. To reassure himself the Emperor decided to go with a
few chosen friends and open the tomb. They gathered in the dead of night.
The tomb was opened. There lay Napoleon, unchanged. The Emperor’s
mind was at rest. He swore the group to secrecy, but took affidavits to be
used in case of political necessity. The fall of the Empire seems to have
made the gentleman feel that his oath was no longer binding, and that he
could cash in on his adventure.
I did not believe the story, but when I expressed my doubt all I could get
out of Mr. McClure was a severe, “What a pity you do not know something
about Napoleon!” No new idea to me, since it was the first thing I was
thinking every morning when I went to work. What I did not know, as I
worried over the possible publication of what I believed a fake, was that in
spite of his quick and enthusiastic acceptance of a good story, S. S.
McClure cared above all for the soundness, the truthfulness of the
magazine. Good stories—yes. But they must hold water, stand the scrutiny
of those who knew. Moreover, he knew what I did not as yet, that he could
go the limit in his enthusiasms since he had at his side a partner on whom
he counted more, I think, than he then realized to balance his excitements.
This happened now. The story was in type, scheduled. Mr. McClure was
going to Europe. “While you’re over there, Sam,” said his partner quietly,
“you better verify that Napoleon story. We’ll hold it until we hear from
you.”
A few weeks later came a laconic postal card. “Don’t publish the story of
the opening of Napoleon’s tomb. It wasn’t opened.”
I never heard the matter referred to after that. By the time he returned he
had forgotten what to me was a near tragedy, to him a joyful bit of editorial
adventure.
I came later to feel that this quick kindling of the imagination, this
untiring curiosity, this determination to run down every clue until you had it
there on the table, its worth or worthlessness in full view, was one of Mr.
McClure’s greatest assets; but it was an asset that would have landed him

frequently in hot water if it had not been for the partner who had saved him
from the Napoleon hoax, John S. Phillips—J. S. P. as he was known in the
office.
Living in Washington as I had been doing, I had seen little of Mr.
Phillips, only heard of him, for his name was the one oftenest on Mr.
McClure’s tongue. His calm and tactful handling of the “General,” as the
office called Mr. McClure, in the ticklish Napoleon story delighted me.
“Here’s a man,” I told myself, “who has a nose for humbugs as well as
one who knows the power of patience when dealing with the impatient.”

At her desk in the McClure’s
office, 1898

As time went on and I spent more and more of it in New York, finally
settling there at the end of the decade, I had better opportunities to watch
Mr. Phillips in action. I was not long in learning that he was the focus of
every essential factor in the making of the magazine: circulation, finance,
editing. Into the pigeonhole of his old-fashioned roll-top desk went daily
reports of bank balances, subscriptions received, advertising contracts to be
signed, books sold. I doubt if he ever went home at night without having a
digest of those reports in his head. He knew their relation to the difficult
problem of putting the undertaking on its feet.
It was largely Mr. Phillips’ love of fine printing and his habit of keeping
track of the advances in printing processes that led McClure’s late in the

nineties to set up its own plant. It included all of the new miraculous self-
feeding machines, automatic presses, folders, binders, stitchers.
It was the first magazine plant of the kind in the country and had many
visitors. Among them was Mark Twain. Mr. Phillips tells an amusing story
of his visit. As they stood watching the press perform, a sheet went awry on
the bed. The press at once stopped and rang a bell calling for the pressman,
who immediately came and helped the big automat out of its plight.
“My God, man!” cried Mark Twain, “That thing ought to vote.”
It did more than cast votes for McClure’s. It saved the money which
finally balanced the budget—and then some.
To those of us on the inside it was always a marvel that John Phillips
found time to be an editor, as well as a focusing center for everything that
went on. At the bottom of his constant editorial supervision was, I think, a
passion for the profession. He was unmistakably the most intellectual, as
well as the best intellectually trained, person in the office. After graduating
at Knox College in Illinois he had taken a degree at Harvard and later spent
two years studying literature and philosophy in the University of Leipzig.
When he came to the magazine he put all his training into the professional
problem.
He was an invaluable aid to the group of staff writers the magazine was
building up. He was no easy editor. He never wheedled, never flattered, but
rigidly tried to get out of you what he conceived to be your best, taking it
for granted that you wanted to make the most of your piece and it was his
business to help you. I never had an editor who so quickly and unerringly
spotted weaknesses, particularly in construction. He had a fine feeling, too,
for the right word, took the trouble to search for it, often bringing in a
penciled memo of suggestions long after you had decided to let it go as it
was. He knew the supreme value of naturalness, detested fake style. “A kind
of disease,” I have heard him say, quoting somebody.
It always disturbed a few of us that nobody outside of the office knew
what an important part in the making of McClure’s John Phillips played. He
had that rare virtue—the willingness and ability to keep out of the picture if
thereby he could make sure the picture was not spoiled in the making.
The one member of the staff besides Mr. McClure whom I knew, when I
began to find myself so to speak absorbed, was already by virtue of his
unusual gift for comradeship a friend as well as a species of boss—that was

Auguste F. Jaccaci, a brilliant artist and art editor as well as one of the most
versatile and iridescent personalities I have ever known. I first met Jac, as
he was called by everybody, in Paris, when as an advance agent of the new
magazine he was sounding out possibilities for writers and illustrators. He
took me out to dinner and paid the addition. We talked until late, then he
simply put me on my omnibus and let me go back to the Latin Quarter
alone. Here was established the modus operandi for our frequent visiting in
the future, in Paris, in New York, in Washington—with one revision. After
that first dinner I paid my share of the check, save on special occasions
when Jac, a knowing epicure, selected the dinner and treated me.
It was he who showed me the first copy of McClure’s, that of August,
1893, showed it to me at five-thirty in the morning, at a café across the
square from the Gare Saint-Lazare where he had ordered me by cablegram
from London to meet him. For nobody in the world excepting a member of
my family should I have been willing at that hour to cross Paris. But I
couldn’t afford to show a lack of interest. Moreover, I must confess that this
preposterous order flattered me a little. It was taking me man to man, I said
to myself. And so I was there. He had to bully the garçon to get a table out
on the sidewalk and make us coffee.
All this was a good basis for a comradeship which lasted to his death. It
lives in my memory as something quite apart in my relations with men. Jac
had a certain superior appreciation and wisdom never quite put into words,
but which you felt. I for my part was always straining to understand, never
quite reaching it. Part of his charm was his confidence in his own
superiority and his anxiety lest we didn’t quite realize it. And then there
were his rages. They came and went like terrible summer thundershowers.
He would roar down the corridor of the office while I sat and watched him
enthralled. Those rages, whether directed at me or somebody else, never
made any other impression on me than that of some unusual natural
phenomenon.
Here then were the leaders in the crowd to which I had been admitted by
virtue of a hasty sketch of Napoleon Bonaparte done on order.
Thank God I had sense enough to realize that here were three rare
personalities, and that to miss such associations would be sheer stupidity.
Also to know that I was an unusually lucky woman to be accepted.

Then there was the magazine they were making. There was something
youthful, gay, natural about it which captivated me. Often, too, it achieved a
most precious thing. Mr. Phillips called it a “lift.” To be youthful, gay,
natural with a “lift”—that was an achievement.
And then I found the place so warmly and often ridiculously human. Mr.
McClure was incapable of standing up before a hard-luck story, with the
result that he brought into that overcrowded office a string of derelicts
ranging from autocratic scrub ladies to indigent editors—brought them in
and left them for J. S. P. to place. But J. S. P. was not far behind in his
sympathy for those who were down and out. I watched him more than once
rescue an author who perhaps out of sheer discouragement had taken to
drink and landed in jail. Mr. Phillips saw that he was bailed out, his debts
paid, work given him. I never ceased to wonder that these two men loaded
with work and responsibility should seemingly consider it part of their daily
job to rescue the wastrel and the disheartened.
There was reason enough for me to stay with McClure’s.

9
GOOD-BYE TO FRANCE

The Napoleon sketch had not been finished before Mr. McClure was
urging me into a new job—not writing this time, but editing, editing
according to his recipe. “Out with you—look, see, report.” Abraham
Lincoln was the subject. My heart fell. “If you once get into American
history,” I told myself, “you know well enough that will finish France. It
will also finish your determination to solve the woman question and
determine the nature of revolutions. They will go the way of the microscope
and your search for God. Are you to spend your life running, now here, now
there, never follow a path to its end?” Or was I taking my ambitions too
seriously? It seemed probable. However, I was to have five thousand a year
if I went along. There was no question in my mind but it was my duty to
earn that money.
Lincoln was one of Mr. McClure’s steady enthusiasms. I once saw him,
in puzzled efforts to find the reason for the continued life of a certain great
American magazine, going through the file from the Civil War on, solely to
find out what attention had been given to Lincoln. “Not a Lincoln article in
this volume, nor in this,” he cried. “It is not a great magazine, it has
overlooked the most vital factor in our life since the Civil War, the influence
of the life and character of Abraham Lincoln.”
His insight told him that people never had had enough of Lincoln.
Moreover, he believed that there was to be had for the seeking a large
amount of “unpublished” reminiscences. It was on this conviction that he
started me off.
He was right about “unpublished” material. Lincoln had been dead only
about thirty years, and hundreds of those who had known him in one
connection or another were still living. His secretaries Nicolay and Hay had

finished their great documentary life of their chief. They should have
personal material not in their volumes. There were members of his Cabinet
still living, members of Congress of his time, editors like Joseph Medill of
the Chicago Tribune, Horace White of the Chicago Tribune and later of the
New York Evening Post, Colonel McClure of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
There were scores of men in Illinois towns who had traveled the circuit with
him, for whom he acted as counsel, scores of people who had as a youth
heard the Lincoln-Douglas Debates, and had been stirred to say, “Lincoln’s
got it right.” They had followed him in his fight against the extension of
slavery and later into the war to save the Union. There was indeed no point
of his short trail from birth to death where living men and women had not
known him as colleagues, friends, opponents, critics.
Also, there had never been a time from the day he had become a
Presidential candidate to the hour of his assassination that his life had not
been under scrutiny. Yet it had been difficult to find out much about him.
“There is not much of me,” he told a friend searching for biographical
material. But there had been enough always to touch deep springs in
American hearts and consciences. Men like William Dean Howells and J.
G. Holland, later to occupy high places in our literary life, had written
campaign lives of him. Hardly was he in his coffin before his brilliant, if
unstable, law partner William Herndon was gathering from all sources
reminiscences, estimates, documents on his life up to the Presidency; and
from his gathering Herndon made a story of extraordinary vitality and color.
Most important—always to remain most important—was the collection of
his Letters and Speeches and the ten-volume “Abraham Lincoln: A History”
by Nicolay and Hay.
Why do more? What was there to be had? Mr. McClure insisted that there
was plenty if one searched.
I went to talk it over with John Nicolay, who as well as his fine daughter
Helen was an honored member of the famous old Washington Literary
Society where I was a frequent guest. I told him what Mr. McClure
proposed. Did he not have something he could give me? He was emphatic
in saying there was nothing of importance to be had. The collection of
letters and speeches he and Mr. Hay had made was complete; they had told
all there was worth telling of Lincoln’s life. He would advise me not to
touch so hopeless an assignment. I think Mr. Nicolay never quite forgave

me for going ahead. Later when the results of my search began to appear
and gradually to shape themselves into a Life of Lincoln he came to me one
evening to protest. “You are invading my field. You write a popular Life of
Lincoln and you do just so much to decrease the value of my property.”
I was deeply distressed. He thought me a poacher. I told him I believed
he was mistaken. I pleaded that if I could write anything which people
would read I was making readers for him. To know a little of Lincoln was
for the serious a desire to know more. He and Mr. Hay had written
something that all students must have. I could never hope to make an
essential lasting contribution. But he went away unconvinced.
Mr. Nicolay’s point of view, if not generous, was certainly honest. I
understand it better now than I did then. He had lived through the great
years of the Civil War always at Lincoln’s elbow. He had been the stern,
careful, humorless guardian of a man who carried his mail in his hat and a
laugh on his lips. His reverence for him was a religion. He had given years
of conscientious hard labor to the editing of the “Complete Works” and the
writing of the history, and now he was retired. Lincoln was his whole life.
We all come to rest our case on the work to which we have given our best
years, frequently come to live on that, so to speak. When the time comes
that our field is invaded by new workers, enlarged, reshaped, made to yield
new fruit, we suffer shock. We may put up a “No trespassing” sign, but all
to no use.
Mr. Nicolay’s tragedy was in not having found a fresh field. How
different it was with his colleague John Hay, whose secretaryship with
Lincoln had been an episode in a diplomatic career of unusual distinction
and usefulness! In 1894 everybody recognized that he had a greater future
before him. His part in the Life of Lincoln had been but one of many
contributions to the literature of his day. His social circle was the choicest,
and he was rich. Hay had everything; Nicolay, only Lincoln, and he looked
on all who touched his field as invaders.
Mr. Nicolay’s rebuff settled my plan of campaign. I would not begin at
the end of the story with the great and known, but at the start in Kentucky
with the humble and unknown; I would follow the trail chronologically; I
would see for myself what sort of people and places those were that had
known Lincoln, reconstruct the life of his day as far as living men and
women backed by published records furnished reliable material. I would

gather documents as I went, bits of color, stories, recollections; I would
search in courthouses and county histories and newspapers; I would pick up
pictures as I went, a picture of everything that directly or indirectly touched
on what I was after. I would make sure if among these people who had
known him there might not be letters not in the “Complete Works”; and, if I
were lucky, somewhere on the trail I might turn up the important
unpublished reminiscences which Mr. McClure was so certain existed. It
was a gamble, the greater because I was so profoundly ignorant of
American life and history.
It was in February of 1895, the Napoleon work still unfinished, though
far enough ahead to give me a month for a preliminary survey, that I started
for the Lincoln country of Kentucky to begin work on this program. It was
characteristic of Mr. McClure, as he saw me off in the deadly cold, to take
sudden alarm for my comfort. “Have you warm bed socks?” he asked
anxiously. “We’ll send you some if not. It will be awful in those Kentucky
hotels.” It was—Louisville aside—awful in more than one hotel and train in
my first month of Lincoln hunting.
The results were not exciting. They were too fragmentary: bits of
unrecorded recollections, a picture, a letter, a newspaper paragraph, a court
record which had passed notice. What was to be done with them? Here was
no smashing new contribution such as an article of unpublished
recollections from Mr. Nicolay might have been, but here were bits of value
if you were to enlarge and retouch the popular notion of the man Lincoln. It
was soon clear to Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips that what I was collecting
must be dovetailed into the published records; and that, they told me, was
my business. Before I knew it I was writing a Life of Lincoln, though the
first three chapters carried the legend, “Edited by Ida M. Tarbell.” The
office seemed gradually to conclude that the editor had become the author,
though I think they were ahead of me in this decision.
We had a lucky break at the start which launched the undertaking even
better, I think, than the big article we were looking for. Among my
Washington acquaintances was a delightful Chicago woman, Mrs. Emily
Lyons. She belonged to the group of early settlers who were still at this time
in the thick of the exciting struggle to make the city the richest, the finest
physically and socially in the country. Their energy, their daring, their
confidence, their eagerness to learn, to adapt, was one of the social

phenomena of the day. Now Mrs. Lyons’ husband was important in the
wealth-producing class as she was in the social. She knew practically
everybody. When she learned that I was interested in new material on
Lincoln she said at once: “Come to Chicago. I’ll see that you meet Robert
Lincoln, and I’ll see that he gives you something.” Too good to be true. But
Mrs. Lyons kept her promise when I reached Chicago on my first
expedition, producing Mr. Lincoln at once.
“Now, Robert,” she ordered as she filled our cups, “I want you to give
her something worth while.”
To be drinking tea with the son of Abraham Lincoln was so unbelievable
to me that I could scarcely take note of his reply. I searched his face and
manners for resemblances. There was nothing. He was all Todd, a big
plump man perhaps fifty years old, perfectly groomed, with that freshness
which makes men of his type look as if they were just out of the barber’s
chair, the admirable social poise of the man who has seen the world’s
greatest and has come to be sure of himself; and this in spite of such
buffeting as few men had had—the assassination of his father when he was
twenty-four, the humiliation of Mary Lincoln’s half-crazed public
exhibition of herself and her needs, the death of his brother Tad, the
heartbreaking necessity of having his mother committed for medical care,
and more recently the loss of his only son. Robert Lincoln had had enough
to crush him, but he was not crushed. At the moment he looked and felt, I
think, that he had arrived where he belonged. The Republican party would
have been happy, no doubt, to make him its leader if he had shown political
genius recalling that of his father. They tried him out. Garfield and Arthur
made him Attorney General, Harrison named him minister to the Court of
St. James’s, but nothing happened. He was not political timber, but by this
time big business wanted him. It was his field. He was now president of the
Pullman Company.
I devoured him with my eyes. He was very friendly. To Mrs. Lyons’ order
to do his best for me he laughingly replied, “Of course if you say so,
Emily.” But he went on to say he was afraid he had little that would help
me. Herndon had taken all his father’s papers from the law office. I think he
used the word “stolen,” but I am not sure; at least I knew he felt they were
stolen. He had protested, but was never able to get anything back. As for the
Presidential period, all the correspondence was packed away in Washington,

but it had been fully used by Nicolay and Hay. However, he had what he
believed to be the earliest portrait made of his father—a daguerreotype
never published. I could have that.
I held my breath. If it was true! I held my breath still longer when the
picture was finally in my hands for I realized that this was a Lincoln which
shattered the widely accepted tradition of his early shabbiness, rudeness,
ungainliness. It was another Lincoln, and one that took me by storm.
Of course we made it the frontispiece to our first installment, and the
office saw to it that those whose opinions were of value had fine prints of it.
It called out some remarkable letters. Woodrow Wilson wrote that he found
it “both striking and singular—a notable picture.” He was impressed by
“the expression of the dreaminess, the familiar face without its sadness.”
Charles Dudley Warner wrote that he found it “far and away the most
outstanding presentation of the man” he had ever seen. “To my eyes it
explains Mr. Lincoln far more than the most elaborate engraving which has
been produced.” A common enough comment was that it “looks like
Emerson.” Edward Everett Hale wrote us that he had shown the picture to
“two young people of intelligence who each asked if it was not Waldo
Emerson.”
A valuable and considered comment came from John T. Morse, the
author of a Life of Abraham Lincoln, as well as editor of a series on leading
American statesmen:
I have studied this portrait with very great interest [wrote Mr. Morse]. All of the portraits with
which we are familiar show us the man as made; this shows us the man in the making. And I think
every one will admit that the making of Abraham Lincoln presents a more singular, puzzling,
interesting study than the making of any other man in human history. I have shown it to several
persons without telling them who it was. Some say a poet; others a philosopher, a thinker, like
Emerson. These comments also are interesting, for Lincoln had the raw material of both these
characters very largely in his composition though political and practical problems so overlaid them
that they show only faintly in his later portraits. This picture, therefore, is valuable evidence as to his
natural traits.
Robert Lincoln was almost as proud as I was of the character of the
comment. If he felt, as he well may have done, that he was taking a chance
in responding so generously to his friend Mrs. Lyons’ order, he was
rewarded by the attention the picture received from those whose opinions
he regarded highly. Always thereafter he was quick to see me when I took a
Lincoln problem to him, as I did when I had exhausted all other sources. He
was always frank and downright. One puzzle I brought amused him no

little. It was the recurring rumor that Abraham Lincoln had written a letter
to Queen Victoria early in the war begging her not to recognize the
Confederacy. He was said to have sent it direct. Now no hint, however
unlikely, no clue, however shadowy, was passed by in what had become in
the McClure office a veritable bureau of Lincoln research. “Anything is
possible,” was our watchword. I was carrying on a widespread
correspondence and continually dashing in one direction or another on what
turned out often to be wild-goose chases, but also not infrequently brought
in valuable game. Mr. McClure was especially excited over this letter. The
State Department pooh-poohed the idea; the curator of documents in
London was noncommittal. I interviewed people who were in position to
know what was going on, but learned nothing. Finally I went to Chicago to
see Robert Lincoln. His eye seemed harder to me in his office than over
Mrs. Lyons’ tea table, but he quickly put me at ease. I was certain that my
quest was going to seem ridiculous to him; indeed, it had become a little so
to me. But he didn’t throw it aside. He picked it up and played with it. He
had never heard of such a letter and doubted if it had been written.
“If father had done that,” he said with emphasis, “and Mr. Adams”—
Charles Francis Adams, then minister to Great Britain—“had learned of it,
he would have resigned. Father knew of course that all communication
between governments must be carried on by the credited ambassadors.”
And then he fell to talking laughingly of his own experiences at the Court
of St. James’s. He said he had received all sorts of things to be presented to
the Queen—patchwork quilts, patent medicines, books, sheet music. “I
suppose,” he said, “that lots of Americans fancy that their ambassador
smokes cigarettes awhile every morning after breakfast with the Queen.
They take it for granted he can drop in for tea any time and present quilts.
Of course such people see no reason why a President cannot write a Queen
direct.” And he laughed until the tears came.
That interview put an end for the time being to the search for “the letter
to the Queen,” as the item had come to be called in the office.
When the Life was finally complete Mr. Lincoln wrote me: “It seemed to
me at first that the field had been too many times gleaned to hope for much
from the work you were undertaking, and I must confess my astonishment
and pleasure upon the result of your untiring research. I consider it an
indispensable adjunct to the work of Nicolay and Hay.”

Mr. Nicolay, however, never agreed.
If Robert Lincoln was always friendly he threw me once into the greatest
panic I suffered in the course of my Lincoln work, though this was long
after the Life was published. I had gone to him to ask if he would arrange
for me to consult the collection of Presidential papers. “Impossible,” he
said. “They are in the safety vault of my bank. I won’t allow anybody to see
them. There is nothing of my father’s there, that is of value—Nicolay and
Hay have published everything; but there are many letters to him which if
published now would pain, possibly discredit able and useful men still
living. Bitter things are written when men are trying to guide a country
through a war, particularly a Civil War. I fear misuse of those papers so
much that I am thinking of destroying them. Besides, somebody is always
worrying me about them, just as you are, and I must be ungenerous. I think
I will burn them.”
I was scared; I feared he would do it, but Herbert Putnam, the head of the
Congressional Library, had already seen to that. He did not burn them; the
Library got them finally, but with the condition that they were not to be
opened until twenty-one years after Robert Lincoln’s death. He died in
1926. The papers will not be available to students until 1947, which
probably lets me out!
The early portrait set the key for the series and, as it turned out, a much
higher key than I had believed possible. I found that court records did yield
unpublished documents, that every now and then I ran on a man or woman
who said more or less casually, “Why, we have a letter of Lincoln’s written
to father in ——. Copy it if you wish.” Occasionally I found a speech not in
the “Complete Works.” By the time the work was put into book form in
1899 I had an appendix of three hundred unpublished speeches and letters.
This did not mean that none of them had ever been in print. Many of them
had appeared in newspapers or historical magazines. “Unpublished” meant
uncollected. On the whole this collection stood the scrutiny of experts very
well, though I think I was swindled in the case of at least one document, a
forgery by a man recommended to me by an honest scholar who had used
the man frequently for years.
Forgery was easy, so was pilfering of documents in those days, so little
attention did clerks give to their old papers, so glad were they to get rid of
them. There was frequently no objection to a student carrying off anything

that interested him. One of the most important documents in the
controversy over the legitimacy of Lincoln’s mother is now to be found in
the Barton collection which the University of Chicago bought. Mr. Barton
probably asked permission to take it home for examination, a common
enough practice in Illinois as well as in Kentucky, and forgot to return it.
Probably most of the legal documents in the private Lincoln collections
have been stolen. The original thief would have been horrified to have that
harsh word applied to him. He simply put it into his pocket with or without
permission, saying, “I’ll just take this along.”
But while I did get together some three hundred pieces I came nowhere
near turning up all the letters and speeches then at large. I was under a time
limit. Since I ended my search scores of items, some of value, have been
published in one or another collection. I shall be surprised if, as time goes
on, there does not turn up every now and then a genuine letter, though now
more than ever caution must be taken in accepting a new piece. The forging
of historical documents has become a lucrative trade.
From the beginning I did my best to reconstruct the physical
surroundings of Lincoln’s homes and activities. I was particularly interested
in the setting of the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which I followed in their
order; but it was not until I reached Galesburg, Illinois, where on October 7,
1858, the fifth debate was staged, that I found the stirring and picturesque
material I sought in order to picture the scene of a debate. I was delighted
that it should have been the fifth debate, which I have always considered
the most important of the series, for it was in that that Lincoln brought his
argument down to what to him was the crux of the whole matter, that is, that
slavery was wrong and must be kept back or it would spread over the whole
country.
The debate had taken place on the campus of Knox College on the east
front of its historic Old Main, one of the most beautiful college buildings of
that period in the Middle West.
I had the luck to find in Galesburg a helper who not only enthusiastically
seconded my conviction that here was the place for the illustration which
we wanted, but set out heartily to help me find material. This was John H.
Finley, my old friend on the Chautauqua Assembly Daily Herald. Dr. Finley
was now president of the college—“the youngest college president in the
United States,” he was popularly called, doing a piece of work which was

winning him more and more recognition. It was through him that I was able
to find the newspaper reports of the debate. It was through him that I was
able to meet people who could give me recollections of the day.
The picture which resulted from our joint efforts was made by that
excellent artist William R. Leigh, who did many of the illustrations for the
series. It has had a continuing life, being reproduced again and again on the
occasion of the commemorative celebrations of the debate which Dr. Finley
inaugurated in 1896. It was at this celebration that Robert Lincoln made his
first and only public address about his father.
The real fun of the Lincoln work, as well as some of the worth-while
results, came from setting myself little problems. I was curious, for
instance, to know more of Lincoln as a speaker. Whenever I found an
Illinois man who had been with him on the circuit or in public life I would
bombard him with questions. He would tell me how Lincoln looked, what
his voice was like, how he used stories. They all talked more about the
Lincoln and Douglas debates than any other exhibit, but frequently would
conclude by saying, “Well, those were good speeches, but they were
nothing like the Lost Speech. That was the greatest thing Lincoln ever did.”
Or a man would begin by saying, “Well, you can never know much about
him as a speaker, nobody can that never heard the Lost Speech.”
It was, they said, a speech which so stirred his audience that the very
reporters forgot to take their notes. Knowing reporters, I was skeptical
about that, so I looked up some of them. They all told me that when Lincoln
finally ended his speech they found themselves standing on, instead of
sitting by their writing tables—and without a note!
Still I believed that somebody must remember something about the
speech—enough at least to give an idea of the argument. Perhaps, I said to
myself, I may pick up some of the phrases—get some real notion of it; so I
went prowling about asking questions and finally learned that in the state of
Massachusetts was a man who was said to have taken notes—a cool-headed
man—a lawyer, not a reporter. His name was Henry C. Whitney. He knew
Lincoln well, had travelled the circuit with him, had published a “Life on
Circuit with Lincoln” with which I was familiar.
Of course there was nothing to do but look up Mr. Whitney, and that I
did. To my great satisfaction I found he had a bunch of yellowed notes. He

had always intended to write them up, he said; but when he tried it the
result seemed so inadequate that he gave it up.
After much persuasion Mr. Whitney did get out a version of the Speech.
When he turned it over to me I took it to the men in Illinois with whom I
had talked and asked them what they thought of it. There were those who
said, “It’s impossible to write out that Speech.” But there were others who
said, “Yes, Whitney has caught the spirit, he has the argument, he even has
many of the phrases, as of course he would have if he made notes.”
The most emphatic and enthusiastic statement came from a man of
importance—Joseph Medill, the editor of the Chicago Tribune. Mr. Medill
had been one of the reporters at Bloomington in 1856 when the speech was
made who found himself in the end on top of the table without a note! He
thought Mr. Whitney’s version was close to the original. Indeed, he wrote to
Mr. McClure a long and interesting letter giving his recollections of the
Convention. In that letter he said:
Mr. Whitney has reproduced with remarkable accuracy what Mr. Lincoln said, largely in his
identical language and partly in synonymous terms. The report is close enough in thought and word
to recall the wonderful speech delivered forty years ago with vivid freshness.
Well, that seemed to us reason enough for publishing Mr. Whitney’s
report along with the story of how I had found it, what the people who
heard the speech in the first place said about it, both for and against. And
that we did.
But out in Illinois there were a number of people who did not want to
give up the tradition. The Lost Speech was the greater to them because it
was lost. As long as it was lost you could make it bigger than any speech
any man ever made, and nobody could contradict you. And so you will find
those who claim that the Lost Speech is still lost. And of course you can
take it or you can leave it.
More than once when I plumed myself on a “discovery” I encountered
the loyalty of men to their legends. There was the Herndon story of
Lincoln’s failing to appear at the first wedding arranged for him and Mary
Todd. I realized he rather lets his “historical imagination” loose in his
description, but I never had questioned his story until by chance I
mentioned it to one of the family, a woman who would have been there if
there had ever been such a wedding ready. She froze me with her
indignation. “Mr. Herndon made that story up out of whole cloth. No such
thing ever happened.” Amazed, I flew around to see what other men and

women of the circle said. They all denied it. A sister of Mary Lincoln was
particularly indignant because Mr. Herndon had put the bride in white silk.
“Mary Lincoln never had a white silk dress until she went to Washington,”
she sputtered.
But in spite of all the documents and evidences I collected demolishing
the episode, I reaped only sour looks and dubious headshakes. I had spoiled
a good story or tried to. It still remains a good story. Every now and then
somebody tells it to me. A biographer who tries to break down a belittling
legend meets with far less sympathy than he who strengthens or creates one.
The most important piece of ghost writing I ever did came in the course
of the Lincoln work—Charles A. Dana’s “Recollections of the Civil War.”
Mr. Dana, at that time the active editor of the New York Sun, had had an
exceptional war experience dating from 1862 to 1865 as assistant to
Secretary Stanton. He had spent much time in the field; he had been with
Grant at Vicksburg, with Rosecrans and Thomas at Chattanooga, again with
Grant in the Peninsular Campaign. “The eyes of the government at the
front,” Mr. Lincoln called him.
No man in the administration had had better opportunity of judging
Lincoln, particularly in relation to the conduct of the war, and none was a
better judge of character.
Could I get the whole story as far as it concerned Lincoln? I hesitated to
ask it. The truth was, I was afraid of Mr. Dana. I knew him only on the
editorial page of the New York Sun. He was too clever, too quick-witted,
too malicious for me to get on with, I feared. They laughed at me at the
office when I voiced my qualms. Nobody was held higher there than
Charles A. Dana. He had been a customer of the McClure Syndicate from
the beginning, and they believed in his professional integrity, admired his
detestation and relentless pursuit of fakers, honored and tried to imitate his
editorial motto, “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.”
“Why should you feel this way?” reproved Mr. Phillips. “Mr. Dana is a
gentleman.”
“Nonsense! I’ll take care of it for you,” said Mr. McClure, and he rushed
to the Sun, office. He did fix it and more, for, returning, he told me with
glee that Mr. Dana was willing to give his whole war story, that is if I would
do the work and arrange some practical plan for the interviews. The first
step, of course, was to find what Dana material, published and unpublished,

was in the war records. The editing of the records then under way was in
charge of J. Leslie Perry. Mr. Perry did not believe in women fussing with
history, particularly with Civil War history. War was man’s business.
“How can you understand it?” he shouted at me.
However, I insisted on my rights, and nobody could have been more
helpful when he considered a thing an obligation of his official position. To
the end Mr. Perry’s chief satisfaction came when he caught me slipping.
“That’s what comes from allowing a woman to write history,” he would say
jubilantly.
Between us we brought together a grist of Dana’s dispatches and reports.
I crammed on the campaigns, and by appointment appeared at the end of
Mr. Dana’s day, about four o’clock in the afternoon, for my first interview.
His desk was stripped of everything that pertained to the newspaper, but
held a row of the latest books, not only in English but in three or four other
languages, as well as a copy of the Cosmopolis, an ambitious and rather
pretentious review in three or four languages issued for a short time in the
late nineties.
Mr. Dana had already repented of his promise to Mr. McClure. “I am not
interested in what I did in the past,” he said irritably. “I am interested only
in the present; I am trying to keep up with the world of today. I am studying
Russian now—a very fascinating language. I don’t want to bother with what
I did in the Civil War. What do you propose?”
What I proposed was that he let me come to him with a stenographer and
a set of prepared questions, say three times a week. He agreed, and for a
good many weeks of the winter of ’96 and ’97 I went regularly to the Sun
office after the paper was put to press. By the summer of 1897 I had my
manuscript well in shape. Mr. Dana had never seen any of it. “Send me the
proofs, I’ll read them.”
Publication was to begin in November of 1897. Mr. Dana went to
London for the summer. I sent the proof of the first chapter over with a
good many qualms, for it was all in the first person—“I” and “We.” It came
back with only a few verbal corrections—no comments. He was never to
read more of his Recollections. The number of the magazine which carried
the first chapter carried the notice of his death.

We published the entire story, and later the articles were put into a book,
but with no credit to the ghost!
Taking it all in all it was the most impersonal job I ever had. I do not
remember that Mr. Dana ever volunteered a word in all the many interviews
I had with him except on the subject in hand, and that in answer to my
questions. We never talked of the things which I knew he loved—pictures,
orchids, poetry. It was a businesslike operation from start to finish.
Probably it was his way of punishing me for being afraid of him.
Another and more important series which came out of the Lincoln work
was Carl Schurz’s “Reminiscences.” Here I acted not as a ghost but as an
editorial representative. Mr. Schurz had given me liberally for my story
from his rich Lincoln experiences—the most important unpublished item
being the part he played in helping Mr. Lincoln launch his plan for
compensated emancipation.
As I reported these interviews the office became more and more
convinced that here was a great series of reminiscences—just the kind of
thing that Mr. McClure had hoped for when he first commissioned me to
gather Lincoln material. Could Mr. Schurz be persuaded to write his
reminiscences? When I broached the subject he almost immediately said:
“No, no, I refused Gilder [Richard Watson Gilder, editor of the Century]. I
cannot do it for anybody else.”
But I felt so convinced that he ought to do it that I persisted in my
begging, and finally he began to yield. The handsome sum McClure’s was
willing to pay had something to do with it, for Mr. Schurz was not a rich
man and here was a chance to leave to his family this extra money. Once he
had made up his mind to the task, he thoroughly enjoyed it; and no one
could have been more anxious to use material to suit the needs of the
magazine. Working with him was a joy. He was gay, companionable, full of
anecdotes, frank in comment. I remember him best at his summer home at
Lake George where it was necessary for me to go two or three times to
settle some editorial point. Here you would hear him in the morning as he
was getting ready for breakfast giving the Valkyrie cries, singing motive
after motive of the Wagnerian operas, in a clear youthful voice. Sometimes
he would spring up from the table where he was at work, and seating
himself at the piano would improvise dashingly until the mood which had
taken him from his desk passed; then back to his labor.

The house stood in the upper corner of a park of fifty or sixty acres of
woodland—not over-cleared—and open by winding paths down the hillside
to the lake. Every turn, every rock had its name usually celebrating some
Wagnerian scene, and as you passed Mr. Schurz would roll out the
appropriate song. There never was a more lovable or youthful man of
seventy than Carl Schurz.
The completion of the Life of Lincoln did not end my interest in the man.
He had come to mean more to me as a human being than anybody I had
studied. I never doubted his motives, and he never bored me. Still,
whenever I have the opportunity I pick him up. The greatest regret of my
professional life is that I shall not live to write another life of him. There is
so much of him I never touched.

10
REDISCOVERING MY COUNTRY

The four years I put in on “The Life of Abraham Lincoln” did more than
provide me with a continuing interest. They aroused my flagging sense that
I had a country, that its problems were my problems. This sense had been
strong in my years on The Chautauquan, but the period following had
dimmed it. Now I was beginning to ask myself why we had gone the way
we had since the Civil War. Was there not enough of suffering and of
nobility in that calamity to quiet the greed and ambitions of men, to soften
their hates, to arouse in them the will to follow Lincoln’s last counsels
—“With malice toward none; with charity for all ... let us ... do all which
may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with
all nations.” But greed and hate and indifference to the sufferings and rights
of others had been rampant since the war. Did war as a method of righting
wrongs so loosen the controls which man in times of peace establishes over
himself that he is incapable of exercising the charity, the peaceful
adjustments for which Lincoln called? Was there always after war an
unescapable crop of corruption, of thirst to punish and humiliate and exploit
the conquered? Must men go back where they had started, go back with
controls weakened and burdened with a load of new and unexpected
problems? True, this war had ended slavery as a recognized institution,
given the black man legal freedom, but how about opportunity, discipline
for freedom? And then again was a war necessary to destroy slavery? Was it
not already doomed? Lincoln thought so. Doomed because it was showing
itself unsound economically as well as because it outraged man’s sense of
justice and humanity. And how about the effect of this war on democracy?
Were the problems it loosed less threatening to democratic ideals than

slavery had been? Were they not possibly a more subtle form of slavery,
more dangerous because less obvious?
A nice box of problems to tease me as I worked on Lincoln’s life and out
of the corner of the eye watched what was going on in the country. The
number of things in America I was beginning to want to find out about was
certainly dimming the things in France I had wanted to find out about.
Unquestionably these new interests were helping to wean me from the plan
on which I had settled. The process was painful. More than once I told
myself that the sacrifice of my ambitions, of my love for Paris, for my
friends there, was too much to ask of myself. I could never replace those
interests and associations; but I was replacing them and suffering as I
realized what was happening, revolting that nothing in my life seemed to
last, to be carried through. By nature I was faithful. To give my time to new
friends, neglect old ones in spite of never forgetting them, as I never did,
was disloyal. I was beginning to repeat dolefully as well as more and more
cynically, “Tout lasse, tout casse, tout passe.”
Washington was helping in my weaning. The city as I knew it in the
1890’s is lost in the Washington of the 1930’s. The pivots on which it
swings, the Capitol, the White House, were there then to be sure. So was the
Washington Monument; but they stood by themselves, the near-by flanking
unpretentious, often squalid. Today they are almost lost in the piles of
marble heaped about them to accommodate the ambitions and creations of
the last frantic twenty years. The town has stretched unbelievably to the
northwest. Where once I knew wide lawns, wooded tracts, pleasant walks,
are now acres upon acres of apartment houses and hotels. They have
engulfed the delightful Woodley Lane where my friends the Hubbards lived
in summer, and they have changed no less the quarter in which their fine
town house stood—Connecticut Avenue where it merges into Dupont
Circle. Great houses were only just beginning then to find their way into the
Circle. George Westinghouse had built there, so had Mrs. Leiter of Chicago.
Old Washingtonians sniffed at their houses and their ways, laughed at Mrs.
Leiter’s “spinal staircase” as she was said to call it, and professed disgust at
Mrs. Westinghouse’s “reported” white velvet tablecloths. They resented the
invasion of rich women attracted by the social possibilities of a diplomatic
circle, of rich men attracted by the field for lobbying furnished by a
Congressional circle.

But of this side of Washington I saw nothing. My social life was shaped
largely by the continued kindness of Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard. I had become
almost one of the family, was freely invited to meet their friends. Their
circle was wide, including diplomats and statesmen and eminent visitors,
though its core was the large group of distinguished scientists which made
up the working forces of the Smithsonian Institution, the Agriculture
Department, the Geological Survey, the Bureau of Mines, the Observatory.
An important group they were, and nobody in town appreciated them more
or took more pains to show his appreciation than Mr. Hubbard. Naturally
the center of this group was Alexander Graham Bell, married to the
Hubbards’ daughter, Mabel.
The Bells lived across the Avenue from the Hubbards, and I soon had the
good fortune to be welcomed there—a great privilege, for both Mr. and
Mrs. Bell were rare persons. Mrs. Bell’s story is well known, but it was
only in seeing her with her husband and daughters that one could realize
what a fine intellect and what an unspoiled and courageous character she
had. She had been deaf and dumb from infancy, and Mr. Hubbard had
determined to open life to her. Among the teachers of speech he brought to
her was a young man then at Boston University—Alexander Graham Bell.
Under his tutelage she made rapid strides, and the two young people learned
to love one another. At that time Mr. Bell was giving his nights to trying to
“make iron talk.” I once heard Mr. Hubbard say that when he found Mr.
Bell had made iron talk he told him he must develop his telephone to a
practical point or he could not have Mabel. Probably no other argument
would have persuaded Alexander Graham Bell, for he was the type of
inventor whose interest flags when he has solved his problem. Let
somebody else take care of the development. He would be off on a new
voyage of discovery.
At the time I came into the circle Mr. Bell was, I think, the handsomest
and certainly the most striking figure in Washington. It was amusing to hear
people discussing who was the handsomest man in town. There were
various candidates—General Miles, General Greely, Colonel John Foster;
but while I conceded they all had their points no one of them had the
distinction of Alexander Graham Bell, and no one of them certainly had the
gay boyish appetite for what he found good in life. He was more like Massa
Henry Watterson in that than anybody else I have ever known, though the
activities and interests of the two were utterly different.

Mr. Bell’s plan of living was modeled to suit himself. Often he slept
through the day when interruptions naturally came and the telephone most
often rang! If restless at night he played the piano. Mrs. Bell could not hear,
and the rest of the family, being young and devoted, were never disturbed.
He was up and began his day around four to six. Often there were guests for
dinner, for everybody of note the world over who came to Washington
wanted to meet him. On Wednesdays after dinner there usually gathered a
group of scientists and public men to talk things over. Mr. Bell was
something to see at these dinners and gatherings, the finest social
impresario I ever saw in action, so welcoming, appreciative, eager,
receptive. I thought then I had never seen anybody so generous about what
others were doing. He loved to draw out great stories of adventure and
discovery and would silence all talkers when once such narrating was
started. Partly this was because of Mrs. Bell, his intense desire that she
enjoy everything that was going on; and she did, thanks to the intelligent
devotion of her daughters, Elsie and Marian, the first now the wife of
Gilbert Grosvenor, one of the founders and the present editor of the
National Geographic Magazine, the second the wife of David Fairchild,
botanist and explorer, the organizer in the Agriculture Department of the
work now known as the Division of Foreign Plant Exploration and
Introduction—two men to whom the public owes big debts for services.
The most distinguished member of this Washington group of scientists
after Mr. Bell was Professor Samuel Pierpont Langley, the head of the
Smithsonian Institution, at that time agonizing over the problem of flying.
When I first met Dr. Langley in 1894 he was working on his air runner or
aerodrome, a machine which, as I gathered from the talk I heard and did not
too well understand, was to run on the air as an engine does on rails. He
finally came out with a machine weighing about twenty-five pounds made
up of a pair of rigid wings, twelve to fifteen feet across, and an engine
which weighed not over seven pounds. It had cost him four years’ work to
develop the engine to that lightness. But would it fly? Could it be launched?
Attempts were made from a houseboat down the river. These experiments
were carried on with the utmost secrecy, for Dr. Langley was a taciturn
man, proud, dignified, always awesome to me. He knew that there was a
public that thought him a little touched in the head and wondered that the
Government kept, as director of a great national institution, a man who held

the crazy notion that one day people would fly, and who was willing to give
his days and nights to proving it.
Dr. Bell took the most genuine and enthusiastic interest in Dr. Langley’s
experiments, was always present, I think, when an attempt to launch the air
runner was made. I recall his disappointment when it fell, his rejoicing
when it did finally fly. This was one day in May of 1896. I have heard him
tell how suddenly the air runner rose to one hundred feet and flew in a big
circle. It did not fall but made a perfect landing. Again it was launched and
again it flew; and this time it went over the land and over the treetops, came
back to the river and when its power was exhausted settled quietly on the
water.
Inside that little circle at Dr. Bell’s there was the consciousness of a great
discovery, a certain solemnity that again it had been proved that labor,
training, thought, patience, faith are not in vain.
Mr. McClure was as excited as any one of the Washington group over the
news. He must immediately have an article from Dr. Langley himself, and I
was commissioned to get it. I think perhaps it was a little strain on Dr.
Langley’s good will to have a young woman come to him and say: “Now
we want the whole story of how you have done this thing, what it means;
but no scientific jargon, please. We want it told in language so simple that I
can understand it, for if I can understand it all the world can.” Which,
knowing me, he probably knew was true. He consented, and I had the
privilege of talking with him occasionally about the article, of reading what
he did and saying when necessary, “I don’t see quite what this or that
means,” of seeing him docilely make it clear enough for me to understand.
A year after the Langley contraption first flew we had in McClure’s
Magazine the whole story.
As a reward for my persistent effort to see that article come out to his
satisfaction, he gave me what I think he considered the greatest treat he
could give his friends. He took me to the Rock Creek Zoo after the crowds
had gone and, with the help of the director, Dr. Baker, made the kangaroo
jump and the hyena laugh.
But the public interest in his air runner, the fresh honors that now came to
him did but little to wipe out the bitterness that ridicule had stirred in Dr.
Langley. “There was a time,” he said as he was going to England to take a
degree which Oxford University (I believe it was) was giving him, “there

was a time when I should have been glad of this. It means little now.” Yet
he had his moments of strong emotion. Rarely have I been more moved
than at a dinner at Mr. Hubbard’s soon after the Greco-Turkish War began
in 1897. A half-dozen men of seventy or thereabouts were at the table,
among them Senator Hoar of Massachusetts, Major Powell, Edward Everett
Hale, and Dr. Langley. They talked only of Greece and her helplessness
before the Turk. They recalled the wave of sympathy which in their
boyhood had swept over the country when the Turk attacked Greece. It was
to Greece, said Senator Hoar, that he first gave money of his own, a long
treasured twenty-five-cent piece. Dr. Hale and Dr. Langley fell to quoting
Byron. Their voices shook as they declaimed,
“The Isles of Greece, the Isles of Greece!

· · · · ·

Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylae.”

“It was Byron,” said Dr. Langley with an emotion of which I had thought
him incapable, “who first stirred in me an enthusiasm for man’s struggles
for freedom, with a desire to join those who fight for it.” He thought Byron
first opened England’s eyes to her duty to the oppressed of the Continent of
Europe and at the same time opened the eyes of the Continent to the love of
liberty, the sympathy with the helpless, in English literature. Certainly here
was a Dr. Langley I had never before glimpsed.
This was not all of Washington I was seeing. As in Paris I set aside time
for learning the city. How thin and young and awkward Washington seemed
compared with the exhaustless life and treasures of Paris! Here was none of
that wisdom of experience, that subtile cynicism, that pity and patience with
men which made Paris like a great human being to me. Nor was there here
the ripe charm of old palaces, quaint streets, hidden corners. Everything
was new, sprawling in the open. But if Washington had little to offer but
promise it had that in abundance, and it did not know its own lacks. It was
too full of pride in what it had done since John Adams moved into the
White House and Congress into the Capitol. And then I had a problem to
think about—the Washington Lincoln knew—and I went about with him
from White House to War Department, up to the Congress, down to the

Arsenal, into this and that hospital, up to the Soldiers’ Home, over to
Arlington. The pain and tragedy behind almost every step he took in the
town dignified its unfinished streets, gave a meaning and a sanctity to its
rawness. By such steps I told myself did Paris come through the centuries to
be what she is.
But I did more than follow Lincoln about. I wanted to know the
Washington of thirty years after Lincoln, and so I went to the Capitol when
debates promised excitement, and I missed no great official show. When
McKinley’s inauguration came in 1896 I arranged to see it all. Once, I told
myself, will do forever for an inauguration—as it has done. I began after
breakfast and did not stop until the Inaugural Ball was far on its way. A fine
colorful sightseeing experience, leaving a series of pictures which have
never quite faded. Years later one of these pictures brought me a curious bit
of minor political history. I was trying to persuade Richard Olney to write
the story of the Venezuela message for McClure’s and remarked that the
first time I met him was at the McKinley Inaugural Ball. To my surprise he
flushed.
“Outgoing Cabinet members are not expected to attend the Inaugural Ball
of a new President,” he said. (I hadn’t known that, or of course I should not
have spoken.) “But there was a reason for my presence. General Miles, then
head of the Army, had come to me to say that there were rumors of an
attempt on McKinley’s life. ‘Suppose that both he and Hobart should be
assassinated before a new Cabinet is appointed,’ he said. ‘You would be
Acting President. You must go to the Ball, walk with Mrs. McKinley, and
stay until the end.’ I didn’t like the idea, but General Miles insisted; so I
went. But the new President walked with his wife, and I had to hang
around, conscious that more than one Republican was saying, ‘What’s
Olney doing here?’”
What was behind General Miles’ precaution, I never knew. The lives of
presidents are always in danger, even in what we are pleased to call normal
times, there being always plenty of grievances, real and fancied, to be
squared. At the moment of the McKinley inauguration the despair and
bitterness of many radicals over the defeat of Bryan were outspoken. The
experience of the country with assassination in the thirty preceding years
had been alarming. A man in General Miles’ position charged with the
safety of the heads of the government must keep in mind all possibilities. It

would, of course, have been easy to assassinate the President and Vice
President at the Ball. Given clever and determined conspirators, there
would have been a chance to seize the government while a new President
was being elected. But with a determined man like Olney on the ground,
backed by a watchful and sufficient military guard scattered through the
great Patent Office where the Ball was held, a temporary government could
have been formed while the murderer was being manacled.
How General Miles would have enjoyed such a coup! In the first years of
McKinley’s administration I came to know him well, another one of the
friendly acquaintances made in carrying out the varied tasks that came my
way in my position as a contributing editor of McClure’s Magazine. For
several years popular interest in military affairs had been growing. There
were several reasons: doubt of the efficiency of our army, talk of revolution,
and particularly our strained relations with Spain.
Interest was still further excited in 1896 by the outbreak of the Greco-
Turkish War, which, starting as a skirmish, soon grew until it looked as if it
might involve all southeastern Europe, perhaps England, Russia. Obviously
we should have an observer over there, and so in May General Miles and a
staff started for the field. He studied the military organization of Turkey and
of Greece, watched the armies lined up for battle, saw the end of the war.
From Greece he and his staff went to London to represent the United States
at Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Following that great show he had attended the
autumn maneuvers of the greatest of then existing armies, those of Russia,
Germany, and France.
Mr. McClure thought there was an important story in General Miles’
observations, and I was commissioned to get it. But General Miles, willing
and glad as he was to tell of his European experiences—he had never been
abroad before—wanted to tell only of the sights he had seen, sights which
had nothing to do with armies, their equipment, and their maneuvers. All
that was shop for him. “They’ll think I didn’t see anything but soldiers and
guns,” he growled, “think I’m not interested in history and art. People don’t
know how wonderful Pompeii is, and I would like to tell them. A lot of
them never heard of Alexander’s sarcophagus—finest thing I ever saw.
There are countries that would pay a million dollars to get it, and there’s the
Parthenon and Moscow and the Tower of London and the Louvre. There are
the things I want to write about.” And he was preparing to do it, as I saw by

the stack of Baedekers, the volumes of the Britannica, the pamphlets and
travel books on his desk. It took all my tact and patience to persuade the
General that, whatever his interest, ours was centered only on military
Europe.
In the course of this distasteful task I came to have a real liking for
General Miles. He was as kindly and courteous a gentleman as I have ever
known, and certainly the vainest. One of the real disappointments of his
European visit was that the American uniform was so severe. There were
hundreds of lesser ranks than himself on parade with three times the gold
braid he was allowed. When it came to the Queen’s Jubilee he revolted and
had special epaulets designed. I was at Headquarters the day they arrived
from London, and nothing would do but I must see them. He ordered the
box opened, disappeared into an inner office and came back arrayed in all
the glory the American Army allowed him.
I was working on the Miles articles on February 16, 1898, when the
Maine blew up in Havana harbor. As no message came canceling my
appointment with General Miles that morning I presented myself as usual
though with some misgiving, for it seemed as if the very air of Washington
stood still. At Headquarters there was a hush on everything, but the routine
went on as usual. As we worked an orderly would come in with the latest
report: “Two hundred fifty-three unaccounted for, two officers missing, ship
in six fathoms of water only her mast visible, sir.” Then a second report:
“All but four officers gone, sir, and there are two hundred women up in the
Navy Department.” (The Army and Navy were in the same building in
1898.)
The General made no comment, but every now and then blew his nose
violently, while his smart Chief of Staff, a gallant simple-minded officer
with a bullet hole in his cheek, kept saying to himself: “Ain’t it a pity! By
Jove, ain’t it a pity!”
Through the two months between the blowing up of the Maine and the
declaration of war I vacillated between hope that the President would
succeed in preventing a war and fear that the savage cries coming from the
Hill would be too much for him, as they were in the end. I honestly believed
then as I do now that he was doing his best, and this in spite of the fact that
my heart was hot with resentment for what I considered his cowardly
desertion of my Poland friends in 1893.

McKinley was patient, collected, surprisingly determined. Everybody
indeed in the departments where the brunt must fall if war came seemed
steady to me, as I watched things in my frequent visits to General Miles’
Headquarters. Everybody was at his post, everybody except Theodore
Roosevelt, Assistant Secretary of the Navy. He tore up and down the wide
marble halls of the War and Navy Building—“like a boy on roller skates,” a
disgusted observer growled. More than once he burst into General Miles’
office with an excited question, an excited counsel. Already he was busy
preparing his Rough Riders for the war to be if he had his way. Already he
saw himself an important unit in an invading army.
I remember this because it shocked me more than anything else I was
noting. What chance had government in peace or war if men did not stay on
their jobs? Was not fidelity to the trust committed to you a first obligation?
And if Theodore Roosevelt felt—as he evidently did—that he was needed
in the Army, did not good manners if nothing else require resignation? I was
very severe on him in 1897, the more so because he had bitterly
disappointed me in 1884 when he had refused to go along with the
mugwumps in the revolt against Prohibitive Protection, refused and gone
along with my particular political abomination, Henry Cabot Lodge. I had
not been able to reconcile myself to him even when as a Police
Commissioner of New York City he made his hearty and effective fight on
the town’s corruption.
The steadiness of General Miles and his staff in the weeks between the
blowing up of the Maine and the breaking out of war with Spain raised my
respect for Army training as much as Roosevelt’s excited goings-on
antagonized me. At the same time my contempt for the outpouring of
Congress in a crisis was modified by almost daily association with one of
its oldest members, the Senator from Massachusetts, George Frisbie Hoar.
When I had decided in 1894 that sufficient materials were at hand in
Washington for the sketch McClure’s wanted, to go with Gardiner
Hubbard’s Napoleon portraits, I went to live at a boarding house on I Street
between Ninth and Tenth recommended by Mrs. Hubbard, chiefly because
Senator and Mrs. Hoar lived there. The neighborhood had been not so long
before one of the desirable residential sections of the town, but business and
fashion were pushing well-to-do residents into Connecticut and
Massachusetts avenues, into Dupont Circle and beyond. The fine old

brownstone houses left behind were being used by trade and occasionally
by owners, whose incomes had been cut or destroyed, as rooming or
boarding houses. The head of the house into which I was received was a
Mrs. Patterson, the widow of a once distinguished Washington physician.
She and her daughter Elizabeth made of their home one of the most
comfortable and delightful living places into which I had ever dropped.
Such food! And best of all the Senator.
At this time Senator Hoar was close to seventy years of age. He had been
in Congress for twenty-six consecutive years, seventeen of them in the
Senate, and everybody knew that as long as he lived Massachusetts
Republicans would insist on returning him. He embodied all the virtues of
the classic New Englander and few of the vices. His loyalty was granite-
ribbed; he revered the Constitution and all the institutions born and reared
under it. He was proud of the United States, but his heart belonged to
Massachusetts. In his mouth the name took on a beauty and an emotion
which never ceased to stir me—Westerner that I was.
Combined with his patriotic loyalties was a passionate devotion to classic
literature—Greek, Roman, English. He knew yards of Homer and Virgil, as
well as of the greatest of the early English writers, and not infrequently at
our Sunday morning breakfasts he would repeat long passages in his
sonorous voice. This was the one hour in the week when the Senator laid
aside all formality and became our entertainer. He never spoiled things by
opinions on current events, but poured forth daily whatever came into his
mind. We were a good audience, willing to sit until noon if he would talk.
He claimed that it was Mrs. Patterson’s codfish balls and coffee that put to
flight all his cares and loosened his tongue. That Patterson Sunday morning
breakfast was enough to put gaiety into any heart. Senator Hoar had already
celebrated it in a widely circulated letter to a Pennsylvania editor who
attacked him for never having done a stroke of useful work in his life and,
what greatly amused the Senator, living in Washington on “champagne and
terrapin!”:
My dear man [he wrote the irate critic], your terrapin is all in my eye, very little in my mouth. The
chief carnal luxury of my life is in breakfasting every Sunday morning with an orthodox friend, a
lady who has a rare gift for making fish balls and coffee. You unfortunate and benighted
Pennsylvanians can never know the exquisite flavor of the codfish, salted, made into balls and eaten
on a Sunday morning by a person whose theology is sound, and who believes in all the five points of
Calvinism. I am myself but an unworthy heretic, but I am of Puritan stock, of the seventh generation,
and there is vouchsafed to me, also, some share of that ecstasy and a dim glimpse of that beatific
vision. Be assured, my benighted Pennsylvania friend, that in that hour when the week begins, all the

terrapin of Philadelphia or Baltimore and all the soft-shelled crabs of the Atlantic shore might pull at
my trouser legs and thrust themselves on my notice in vain.
As we all knew, Senator Hoar had no money for “champagne and
terrapin.” He had sacrificed his law practice to public service, “getting a
little poorer year by year.” As a matter of fact he had no interest in making
money. I never saw him more irritated than after taking a difficult case for
which he was to get a fee of twenty-five thousand or thirty thousand dollars.
“Earning money is hateful to me,” he said. “Never in all my life before
have I undertaken a thing I did not want to do simply for money. Some
things I like to do, believe that I can do better than I could do anything else.
I never was such a donkey before. There are so many things I long to do;
one of them is to learn Italian well enough to read Dante and Boccaccio and
Ariosto in the original; and I want to commit Homer to memory. I would
like to have my head packed with Greek.”
The Senator’s Sunday morning talks were rich with anecdotes of New
England types. He had his antipathies—Margaret Fuller Ossoli was one of
them. He used to tell the story of an old Concord doctor who was called up
in the night by a quavering voice outside his window asking, “Doctor, how
much camphire can a body drink without its killing ’em?” “Who drunk it?”
he asked. “Margaret Fuller.” “A peck,” snapped the doctor, shutting his
window with a bang.
Dr. Mary Walker, who in her rather shabby man’s attire was a familiar
figure in those days, was a particular abomination. She made him “creepy,”
he said. Simply to mention her, I found, would dry up his talk. But the
mention of Jonathan Edwards’ name, although he particularly detested him,
always loosened his tongue. “He was an inhuman cuss,” he said one
morning. “There is a true story of his riding through Northampton with a
slave boy whom he had just bought tied to a cord and trotting behind the
horse. ‘Is thee doing as thee would be done by?’ a woman of his faith called
him, and Edwards said, ‘I’ll answer you some other time.’”
Senator Hoar rather enjoyed calling a man whose acts he disliked by hard
names. Indeed he very much enjoyed salty words generally, and one
morning ably defended them: “‘Dammit’ is a useful word. It eases one’s
feelings.” He also put up a strong argument for “whoppers.” “They are,” he
contended, “a valuable weapon with the impertinent and the imbecile.”
There was much boyish mischief in him. He greatly admired our
wholesome big-hearted Elizabeth, daughter of the house, her common sense

and her gaiety, and loved to pinch her plump arm. He did it in the presence
of us all and in spite of Mrs. Hoar’s reproaches. “Do you know, Elizabeth,”
he said one evening as he followed us up the stairs from the dining room,
“that it has taken nineteen hundred years of Christian civilization to produce
a man who does not pinch a girl’s pretty ankle when she is going upstairs
ahead of him?”
In July, 1898, after Congress had adjourned Senator Hoar made up a
party for a trip through the Berkshire Hills and I had the good fortune to be
asked to join it. I had heard him talk much of his walking trips there in
Harvard days with his favorite classmate, Francis Child: “as great a man at
seventeen when he entered college,” he said, “as when he died—a real
genius.” From the moment our little caravan left his home at Worcester the
trip was like champagne to him. Trees, graveyards, epitaphs, views, the
homes of the honored in this day and past days kept him busy. There was
the Sheffield elm which we must stop to measure, the grave of Mumbet
with the inscription his favorite Catharine Sedgwick had written for it; there
was the best view of the Sleeping Napoleon on Cedar Mountain—this for
me. Then we must spend the night at a certain inn on Mount Washington to
give Elizabeth plenty of time to look up family graves and records. Her
father had been born on Mount Washington, which was one of many
reasons why the Senator admired her. He went with her to look up the
graves and, returning late, said, “If we had not feared you would wait
supper we would have stayed and been buried there.”
I have certainly never known anyone for whom life at seventy was more
joyous and full. He hated weakness, as well as everything that impaired his
dignity, his self-reliance. He was a true untouchable and would fall into a
rage if friend or stranger offered to assist him. “Unhand me,” he thundered
at a street car conductor who one day seized his arm to help him up the
steps, and his wrath lasted until he had told us about the indignity at the
dinner table. On this Berkshire trip a little accident happened to him which
caused an explosion of the same nature. We were at an inn in the mountains,
and after dinner had gone on to the lawn. The Senator was sitting on a rustic
bench which gave way, turned him on his back, feet in the air. We all ran to
assist him but were stopped in our tracks by a stentorian voice which
roared, “I decline to be assisted.”

But this was the Senator on a vacation, the Senator of our Sunday
morning’s breakfast. Take him when public affairs were in a serious tangle,
and he was glum, unapproachable. He suffered deeply over the trend to
imperialism after the Spanish-American War. To save Cuba from the
maladministration of Spain, to watch over her until she had learned to
govern herself seemed to him a noble expression of Americanism, but to
annex lands on the other side of the globe for commercial purposes only, as
he believed, was to be false to all our ideals. He had the early American
conviction that minding one’s own business was even more important
abroad than at home. He wanted no entangling alliances, and in those days
following the treaty of Paris he feared as never before for the country.
Certainly there were far fewer Sunday morning breakfast table talks. His
greatest speech against the advancing imperialism was made in April of
1900. At the head of the printed copy of his speech distributed by the Senate
he placed these sentences:
No right under the Constitution to hold Subject States. To every People belongs the right to
establish its own government in its own way. The United States can not with honor buy the title of a
dispossessed tyrant, or crush a Republic.
I was learning something of what responsibility means for a man charged
with public service, of the clash of personalities, of ambitions, judgments,
ideals. And it was not long before I was saying to myself, as I had not for
years, You are a part of this democratic system they are trying to make
work. Is it not your business to use your profession to serve it? But how?
That was clearly now my problem. I could not run away to a foreign land
where I should be a mere spectator. Indeed, I was beginning to suspect that
one great attraction of France was that there I had no responsibility as a
citizen. I must give up Paris. Between Lincoln and the Spanish-American
War I realized I was taking on a citizenship I had practically resigned.
The war had done something to McClure’s as well as to me. In all its
earlier years its ambition had been to be a wholesome, enlivening,
informing companion for readers, to give fiction, poetry, science of wide
popular appeal—an ambition which it must be admitted opened the pages
occasionally to the cheap, though it rarely excluded the fine. An eager
welcome was given new writers. Indeed it was always a great day in the
office when we thought a “real one” had reached us. While it fostered new
writers it held on to the best of the old. It had touched public matters only as
they became popular matters. Thus, when the Spanish-American War came

it was quickly recognized that it yielded more interesting material than any
other subject. There was a great war number and there was a continuous
flow of war articles. McClure’s suddenly was a part of active, public life.
Having tasted blood, it could no longer be content with being merely
attractive, readable. It was a citizen and wanted to do a citizen’s part. It had
a staff sympathetic with this new conception of the work. Mr. McClure had
had in mind from the start the building of a permanent staff of good
craftsmen, reporters on whom he could depend for a steady stream of
contributions, as well as of editorial ideas. He wanted them versatile,
flexible, as interested in the magazine as in themselves, capable of sinking
themselves in a collective effort.
After I came in, the first to become such a permanent acquisition was
Ray Stannard Baker. An article on the capture of John Wilkes Booth by
Baker’s uncle, Colonel L. C. Baker, written from personal reminiscences
and documents, was submitted by Baker, then on the staff of the Chicago
Record. It was “the General’s” ideal of a McClure’s article. Baker was urged
to write more, and each piece emphasized the first impression. The year
after his first appearance in the magazine, May, 1897, he joined the staff
and became a regular contributing editor.
Baker was an admirable craftsman, as well as a capital team worker. He
had curiosity, appreciation, a respect for facts. You could not ruffle or
antagonize him. He took the sudden calls to go here when he was going
there, with equanimity; he enjoyed the unconventional intimacies of the
crowd, the gaiety and excitement of belonging to what was more and more
obviously a success. He was the least talkative of us all, observant rather
than garrulous, the best listener in the group, save Mr. Phillips. He had a
joyous laugh which was more revealing of his healthy inner self than
anything else about him.
When I learned a few years later that Baker was the author of the wise,
homely, whimsical “Adventures in Contentment,” “The Friendly Road” and
other delightful essays under the nom de plume of David Grayson I said at
once, “How stupid of me not to have known it! Haven’t I always known
that Baker is a David Grayson?” Few practical philosophers, indeed, have
so lived their creed as Ray Stannard Baker, and none have had a more
general recognition from the multitude of people in the country who, like
him, believe in the fine art of simple living. It is a comforting and beautiful

thing to have had as a friend and co-worker over many years so rare a
person as Ray Stannard Baker.
By good fortune McClure’s in this period happened on a reader of real
genius—Viola Roseboro—the only “born reader” I have ever known. I
found her in the office after one of my frequent jaunts after material. It was
as a talker that I first learned to admire and love her. Her judgments were
unfettered, her emotions strong and warm, her expressions free, glowing,
stirring, and she loved to talk, though only when she felt sympathy and
understanding. She loved to share books, of which she read many,
particularly in the biographical field; she wanted none but the best—no
imitation, no mere fact-finding. Her eagerness to let no good thing slip, her
consciousness of the all too little time a human being has in this world to
explore its riches made her rigid in her choice. An unsleeping eagerness to
find talent and give it a chance, and secondarily, she said, to enrich the
magazine, made every day’s work with the unsifted manuscripts an
adventure. If she found exceptional merit that was also suited to McClure’s
she might weep with excitement. And she stood to it till faith grew in those
less sure of the untried. It was when McClure’s was making a great hunt for
a good serial that I saw her one morning bringing into the editorial sanctum
Booth Tarkington’s “The Gentleman from Indiana,” tears celebrating the
discovery as she cried, “Here is a serial sent by God Almighty for
McClure’s Magazine!”
This woman of unusual intelligence, loyalty and of truly Spartan courage
was a precious addition to the crowd. Ill health, threatened blindness, have
never lowered her enthusiasm, her ceaseless effort to find the best, to give
the best. She is still doing it.
The most brilliant addition to the McClure’s staff in my time was Lincoln
Steffens. He had made himself felt in the journalistic and political life of
New York City by a fresh form of reportorial attack. Young, handsome, self-
confident, with a good academic background and two years of foreign life
and observation, Steffens began his professional career unencumbered by
journalistic shibboleths and with an immense curiosity as to what was going
on about him. He was soon puzzled and fascinated by the relations of police
and politicians, politicians and the law, law and city officials, city officials
and business, business and church, education, society, the press. Apparently
groups from each of these categories worked together, supporting one

another, an organization close, compact, loyal from fear or self-interest or
both. It was because of this organization, Steffens concluded, that graft and
vice and crime were established industries of the city. Attacks from
outraged virtue had slowed up the system at intervals ever since the Civil
War, but never permanently deranged it. A few rascals might be
exterminated, but they were soon replaced. The system had bred new
rascals, grown stronger and more cunning with time. He set out to trace its
pattern. Incredibly outspoken, taking rascality for granted, apparently never
shocked or angry or violent, never doubtful of himself, only coolly
determined to demonstrate to men and women of good will and honest
purpose what they were up against and warn them that the only way they
could hope to grapple with a close corporation devoted to what there was in
it was by an equally solid corporation devoted to decent and honest
government, business, law, education, religion. First as a reporter and later
as the city editor of the Globe, Steffens stirred the town.
It was entirely in harmony with the McClure method of staff building that
this able, fearless innocent should be marked for absorption. He was
persuaded to take the editing of the magazine, now in its tenth year and
steadily growing in popularity and influence. He was to be the great
executive—the editorial head that would shift some of the burden from the
shoulders of Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips. But the machine was running
smoothly even if with little outward excitement. Steffens made a brave
effort to adjust himself to the established order, to learn the situation.
Naturally he took Mr. McClure’s meteoric goings and comings, his
passionate and often despairing efforts to make his staff “see” what he did,
his cries that the magazine was stale, dying, more seriously than those of us
who had been longer together. He seems to have been bewildered by what
went on in the excited staff meetings held whenever Mr. McClure came in
from a foraging expedition. I had come to look on Mr. McClure’s returns as
the most genuinely creative moments of our magazine life. He was an
extraordinary reporter; his sense of the meaning, the meat of a man or
event, his vivid imagination, his necessity of discharging on the group at
once, before they were cold, his observations, intuitions, ideas, experiences,
made the gatherings on his return amazingly stimulating to me. Sifting,
examining, verifying, following up, were all necessary. Mr. McClure
understood that and trusted John Phillips to see that it was done, but he
properly fought for his findings. In his “Autobiography” Steffens credits me

with a tact in our editorial scrimmages which I do not deserve. It is true, as
he says, that I was the friend of each and all, but what I was chiefly
interested in was seeing the magazine grow in delight and in usefulness. I
knew our excited discussions were really fertile. They also were highly
entertaining.
It was in this unsatisfied seeking by Mr. McClure for more and more of
contemporary life that Lincoln Steffens’ chief contribution to it and to the
political life of his period had its root. Mr. McClure’s fixed conviction that
great editing was not to be done in the office he finally applied to Steffens,
who was bravely struggling there to become the great editor he had been
called to be.
“You can’t learn to edit a magazine in the office,” Mr. McClure told him.
“Get out, go anywhere, everywhere, see what is going on in the cities and
states, find out who are the men and the movements we ought to be
reporting.”
And so Stef went for a month, to the Middle West mainly, constantly
reporting back to the office in McClure fashion what he was finding. He
combed the universities and the newspaper offices; he looked up politicians;
he searched for writers, anything and everywhere which might possibly be
grist to the greedy mill in New York.
One of the schemes on which he had been commissioned to check up was
a series of articles on city and state governments. Almost at once he began
to see larger and larger possibilities in the idea. There should be two series,
he wrote the office, descriptions of the actual government of four or five
typical cities and of as many states, humanized by studies of the men who
ruled them or who were fighting the true rulers. A meeting with young
district attorney Folk of St. Louis, then in the thick of a fight to reform his
town, whetted his appetite. “If we take up the states,” he wrote, “I would
prefer to wait for William Allen White to write the articles. The cities will
be more in my line. If I should be entrusted with the work I think I could
make my name.”
A few weeks later he was entrusted with the work. The result was “The
Shame of the Cities” which, as he prophesied, made his name.

11
A CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY SEEKS MY
ACQUAINTANCE

As Steffens’ case shows there was always much fingering of a subject at
McClure’s before one of the staff was told to go ahead. The original hint
might come from Mr. McClure’s overflowing head and pocket, Mr. Phillips’
notebooks, as much a part of him as his glasses, the daily mail, the chance
word of a caller. We all turned in our pickings. They must concern the life
of the day, that which was interesting people. An idea, once launched, grew
until fixed on somebody; and, once started, it continued to grow according
to the response of readers. No response—no more chapters. A healthy
response—as many chapters as the material justified.
It was by this process that my next long piece of work came into being:
“The History of the Standard Oil Company.”
The deluge of monopolistic trusts which had followed the close of the
Spanish-American War and the “return of prosperity” was disturbing and
confusing people. It was contrary to their philosophy, their belief that, given
free opportunity, free competition, there would always be brains and energy
enough to prevent even the ablest leader monopolizing an industry. What
was interfering with the free play of the forces in which they trusted? They
had been depending on the Federal Antitrust Law passed ten years before.
Was it quite useless? It looked that way.
There was much talk in the office about it, and there came to the top
finally the idea of using the story of a typical trust to illustrate how and why
the clan grew. How about the greatest of them all—the Standard Oil
Company?

I suppose I must have talked rather freely about my own recollections
and impressions of its development. It had been a strong thread weaving
itself into the pattern of my life from childhood on.
I had come into the world just before the discovery of oil, the land on
which I was born not being over thirty miles away from that first well. The
discovery had shaped my father’s life, rescuing him as it did thousands of
others from the long depression which had devastated the eighteen-fifties. I
had grown up with oil derricks, oil tanks, pipe lines, refineries, oil
exchanges. I remembered what had happened in the Oil Region in 1872
when the railroads and an outside group of refiners attempted to seize what
many men had created. It was my first experience in revolution. On the
instant the word became holy to me. It was your privilege and duty to fight
injustice. I was much elated when, not so long afterwards, I fell on
Rousseau’s “Social Contract” and read his defense of the right to revolt.
I had been only dimly conscious of what had happened in the decade
following—the decade in which the Standard Oil Company had completed
its monopoly. It was the effect on the people about me that stirred me, the
hate and suspicion and fear that engulfed the community. I had been so
deeply stirred by this human tragedy, as I have told, that I had made a feeble
and ineffectual attempt to catch it, fix it in a novel.
The drama continued to unfold while I was abroad, came into our very
household when a partner of my father’s ruined by the complex situation
shot himself, leaving father with notes. To pay them it was necessary in the
panic of ’93 to do what in his modest economy was unsound and
humiliating—mortgage our home. While the personal tragedies came in my
mother’s letters, my brother wrote me vivid accounts of what was going on
in the outside oil world, of the slow action of the Interstate Commerce
Commission from which all independents had hoped so much, of businesses
ruined while they waited for the decision; of the Ohio suit which drove the
trust to reorganization, a legal victory which in no way weakened its hold or
crippled its growth. Depressing as this was, I was elated by my brother’s
reports of the growing strength of a strongly integrated cooperative effort of
producers, refiners, transporters, marketers, the Pure Oil Company. The
only escape possible for those who would do independent business, he
argued ably, was to build their own combination depending less on

agitation, politics, legislation, more on sound business. Fight if necessary,
but above all do business.
While I was still in Paris this clutter of recollections, impressions,
indignations, perplexities, was crystallized into something like a pattern by
Henry D. Lloyd’s brilliant “Wealth Against Commonwealth.” I had been
hearing about the book from home, but the first copy was brought me by
my English friend H. Wickham Steed, who, fresh from two years’ contact
with German socialism, took the work with great seriousness. Was not this a
conclusive proof that capitalism was necessarily inconsistent with fair and
just economic life? Was not socialism the only way out, as Lloyd thought?
I was more simple-minded about it. As I saw it, it was not capitalism but
an open disregard of decent ethical business practices by capitalists which
lay at the bottom of the story Mr. Lloyd told so dramatically.
The reading and discussions whetted my appetite; and when I came back
to America in 1894, and heard anew in the family circle of what had been
going on, my old desire to get the drama down seized me. Where were
those notes I had made back in my Chautauquan days? Gathering dust in
the tower room. I looked them up, saw that I had done well in choosing
Pithole for my opening scene. Nothing so dramatic as Pithole in oil history.
How many men it had made and ruined! But “the bottom had dropped out”
in 1866. What was left of it now—1894? My brother and I drove over to
see.
Thirty years before, Pithole had been a city of perhaps twenty thousand
men and women with all the equipment for a permanent life. Now here
were only stripped fields where no outline of a town remained. We spent a
long day trying to place the famous wells, to fix my father’s tank shops, so
profitable while Pithole lasted, to trace the foundations of the Bonta House,
which had furnished the makings of our home in Titusville. The day left us
with a melancholy sense of the impermanence of human undertakings; and,
more to the point, it showed me that if I were to reconstruct the town with
its activities and its people, picture its rise and its fall, I must go back to
records, maps, reminiscences; that I must undertake a long and serious
piece of investigation before I began. But, given the material, how about my
ability to make it live, to create the drama which I felt? One must be an
artist before he can create—that I knew. I was no artist.

Mr. McClure’s call to come on and write a life of Napoleon put an end to
my hesitations; and, Napoleon done, there had been Lincoln and the
Spanish-American War—no time to consider oil or even to rejoice over the
final success of the integrated industry to which my brother had tied his
fortune.
But here I was again faced with the old interest. The desire to do
something about it, get down what I had seen, seized me. Was it possible to
treat the story historically, to make a documented narrative? The more I
talked, the more convinced I was that it could be done. But to tell the story
so that people would read it was another matter. Mr. Phillips finally put it
up to me to make an outline of what I thought possible. We couldn’t go
ahead without Mr. McClure’s approval, and he was ill, in Europe with all
his family.
“Go over,” said John Phillips; “show the outline to Sam, get his
decision.” And so in the fall of 1890 I went to Lausanne in Switzerland to
talk it over with Mr. McClure. A week would do it, I thought; but I hadn’t
reckoned with the McClure method.
“Don’t worry about it,” said he. “I want to think it over. Mrs. McClure
and you and I will go to Greece for the winter. You’ve never been there. We
can discuss Standard Oil in Greece as well as here. If it seems a good plan
you can send for your documents and work in the Pantheon.” And he
chuckled at the picture.
Almost before I realized it we were headed for Greece via the Italian
Lakes, Milan and Venice. In Milan Mr. McClure suddenly decided that he
and Mrs. McClure needed a cure before Greece and headed for the ancient
watering place of Salsomaggiore. Here, in the interval of mud baths and
steam soaks and watching such magnificent humans as Cecil Rhodes and
his retinue recuperating from their latest South African adventure, we
finally came to a decision. I was to go back to New York and see what I
could make of the outline I had been expounding. Greece was to be
abandoned.
Leaving Mr. and Mrs. McClure to finish their cure, I headed for New
York to write what, as far as title was concerned, certainly looked like a
doubtful enterprise for a magazine like McClure’s: “The History of the
Standard Oil Company.”

“McClure’s has courage.” How often that remark was made after our
undertaking was under way! But courage implies a suspicion of danger.
Nobody thought of such a thing in our office. We were undertaking what we
regarded as a legitimate piece of historical work. We were neither
apologists nor critics, only journalists intent on discovering what had gone
into the making of this most perfect of all monopolies. What had we to be
afraid of?
I soon discovered, however, that, if we were not afraid, I must work in a
field where numbers of men and women were afraid, believed in the all-
seeing eye and the all-powerful reach of the ruler of the oil industry. They
believed that anybody going ahead openly with a project in any way
objectionable to the Standard Oil Company would meet with direct or
indirect attack. Examination of their methods had always been
objectionable to them. “Go ahead, and they will get you in the end,” I was
told by more than one who had come to that conclusion either from long
observation or from long suffering.
Even my father said, “Don’t do it, Ida—they will ruin the magazine.”
It was a persistent fog of suspicion and doubt and fear. From the start this
fog hampered what was my first business, making sure of the documents in
the case. I knew they existed. Almost continuously since its organization in
1870 the Standard Oil Company had been under investigation by the
Congress of the United States and by the legislatures of various states in
which it had operated, on the suspicion that it was receiving rebates from
the railroads and was practicing methods in restraint of free trade. In 1872
and again in 1876 it was before Congressional committees; in 1879 it was
before examiners of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and before
committees appointed by the legislatures of New York and of Ohio for
investigating railroads. Its operations figured constantly in the debate which
led up to the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1887; and
again and again since that time the Commission had been called upon to
examine directly or indirectly into its relations with the railroads.
In 1888, in the Investigation of Trusts conducted by Congress and by the
State of New York, the Standard Oil Company was the chief subject for
examination. In the state of Ohio, between 1882 and 1892, a constant
warfare was waged against the Standard in the courts and the legislature,
resulting in several volumes of testimony. The legislatures of many other

states concerned themselves with it. This hostile legislation compelled the
trust to separate into its component parts in 1892, but investigation did not
cease; indeed, in the great industrial inquiry conducted by the Commission
appointed by President McKinley, the Standard Oil Company was
constantly under discussion, and hundreds of pages of testimony on it
appear in the nineteen volumes of reports which the Commission submitted.
This mass of testimony—most, if not all, of it taken under oath—
contained the different charters and agreements under which the Standard
Oil Trust had operated, many contracts and agreements with railroads, with
refineries, with pipe lines; and it contained the experiences in business from
1872 up to 1900 of multitudes of individuals. These experiences had exactly
the quality of the personal reminiscences of actors in great events, with the
additional value that they were given on the witness stand; and it was fair,
therefore, to suppose that they were more cautious and exact in statement
than are many writers of memoirs. These investigations, covering as they
did all of the important steps in the development of the trust, included full
accounts of the point of view of its officers in regard to that development,
as well as their explanations of many of the operations over which
controversy had arisen.
Aside from the great mass of sworn testimony accessible to the student,
there was a large pamphlet literature dealing with different phases of the
subject, as well as files of the numerous daily newspapers and monthly
reviews, supported by the Oil Region, in the columns of which were to be
found, not only statistics, but full reports of all controversies between oil
men.
But the documentary sources were by no means all in print. The Standard
Oil Trust and its constituent companies had figured in many civil suits, the
testimony of which was in manuscript in the files of the courts where the
suits were tried.
I had supposed it would be easy to locate the records of the important
investigations and cases, but I soon found I had been too trustful. For
instance, there was a Federal investigation of the South Improvement
Company, the first attempt to make a hard and fast alliance between oil-
bearing railroads and oil refiners, an alliance which inevitably would kill
everybody not admitted, since by the contract the railroads not only allowed
the privileged refiners a rebate on all their shipments, but paid them a

drawback on those of independents. The railroads also agreed to give them
full information about the quantity and the destination of their rivals’
shipments. The Standard Oil Company as a monopoly had grown out of this
pretty scheme.
Where could I get a copy of that investigation? More than one cynic said,
“You’ll never find one—they have all been destroyed.” When I had located
copies in each of two private collections I was refused permission to put my
hands on them.
To be sure, I did by persistent searching find that so-guarded
investigation in a pamphlet which is one of the three which are all I know to
be in existence. I am not supposing that there are not others, for I quickly
learned, when I was told that the entire edition of a printed document had
been destroyed, to go on looking. Once a document is in print, somewhere,
some time, a copy turns up, however small the edition. For instance, there
was the important Hepburn investigation of the relations of railroads and
private industries made by the State of New York in 1879. I could not find a
copy in the Oil Region where I was working. The Standard had destroyed
them all, I was told. At that time there was in the Public Library of New
York City one of the ablest of American bibliographers—Adelaide Hasse.
She had helped me more than once to find a scarce document.
“How about this Hepburn investigation?” I wrote Miss Hasse.
“Here in the Library for your use whenever you will come around.” But
she added: “Only one hundred copies were ever published. It is a scarce
piece. I have known of a complete set selling for $100.00. It was
understood at the time,” she explained, “that one or two important railroad
presidents whose testimony was given before the committee bought up and
destroyed as many sets as they could obtain.”
In the end all the printed documents were located. But there was the
unprinted testimony taken in lawsuits. Had incriminating testimony been
spirited away from the court files? Henry Lloyd made such an accusation in
his first edition of “Wealth Against Commonwealth.” It disappeared from a
second edition. I wrote to ask him, “Why?” “The testimony was put back
after my book first appeared,” he answered. I was particularly anxious to
have the original of one of these documents, but when I came to look for it,
it was not in the files. Where was it? How was I to locate it? And if I did
succeed would there be any chance—to judge from past experience—that it

would be turned over to me? I saw that I must have an assistant, someone
preferably in Cleveland, Ohio, so many years the headquarters of the
Standard’s operations. It meant more expense, and I was already costing the
office an amount which shocked my thrifty practice. But Mr. McClure and
Mr. Phillips, being generous and patient and also by this time fairly
confident that in the end we should get something worth while, told me to
go ahead.
I had learned in my Lincoln work that an assistant, even if faithful and
hard-working, may be an incumbrance when it comes to investigation. It
needs more than accuracy; it needs enthusiasm for finding out things,
solving puzzles—anybody’s puzzles. I wanted a young man with college
training, a year or two of experience as a reporter, intelligent, energetic,
curious, convinced everything he was asked to do was important, even if he
did not at the moment know why. He must get his fun in the chase—you in
the bag. Also he must be trusted to keep his mouth shut.
I can recommend the technique I practiced in this case for finding my
rare bird. From each of three different editors in Cleveland I asked the name
of a young man whom he thought competent to run down a not very
important-looking bit of information. To each of the names given me I
wrote instructions from New York. I would be around soon to pick up the
report, I told them, adding that I should prefer that he say nothing about the
assignment.
When I went to Cleveland to view my prospects I found both number one
and number two fine intelligent fellows. Their reports were excellent, but
they had not the least interest in what they had done. I thanked them, paid
them, and said, “Good day.” The third young man came, short and plump,
his eyes glowing with excitement. He sat on the edge of his chair. As I
watched him I had a sudden feeling of alarm lest he should burst out of his
clothes. I never had the same feeling about any other individual except
Theodore Roosevelt. I once watched the first Roosevelt through a White
House musicale when I felt his clothes might not contain him, he was so
steamed up, so ready to go, attack anything, anywhere.
The young man gave me his report; but what counted was the way he had
gone after his material, his curiosity, his conviction that it was important
since I wanted it. I thought I had my man. A few more trials convinced me
John M. Siddall was a find. He at that time was an associate of Frank Bray

in the editing of The Chautauquan, the headquarters of which had been
shifted to Cleveland from Meadville.
When Siddall once understood what I was up to he jumped at the chance
—went to work with a will and stayed working with a will until the task
was ended. He was a continuous joy as well as a support in my undertaking.
Nothing better in the way of letter writing came to the McClure’s office. In
time everybody was reading Siddall’s letters to me, whether it was a mere
matter of statistics or a matter of the daily life in Cleveland of John D.
Rockefeller, the head of the Standard Oil Company. If anything in or around
Ohio interested the magazine the office immediately suggested, “Ask Sid.”
And Sid always found the answer. Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips began to
say, “We want Sid as soon as you are through with him.” Sid saw the
opportunity, and as soon as I could spare him in Ohio he joined the
McClure’s staff.
I had been at work a year gathering and sifting materials before the series
was announced. Very soon after that, Mr. McClure dashed into the office
one day to tell me he had just been talking with Mark Twain, who said his
friend Henry Rogers, at that time the most conspicuous man in the Standard
Oil group, had asked him to find out what kind of history of the concern
McClure’s proposed to publish.
“You will have to ask Miss Tarbell,” Mr. McClure told him.
“Would Miss Tarbell see Mr. Rogers?” Mark Twain asked.
Mr. McClure was sure I would not ask anything better, which was quite
true. And so an interview was arranged for one day early in January of 1902
at Mr. Rogers’ home, then at 26 East Fifty-seventh Street. I was a bit scared
at the idea. I had met many kinds of people, but this was my first high-
ranking captain of industry. Was I putting my head into a lion’s mouth? I
did not think so. It had become more and more evident to me that any
attempt to bite our heads off would be the stupidest thing the Standard Oil
Company could do, its reputation being what it was. It was not that stupid, I
told myself. However, it was one thing to tackle the Standard Oil Company
in documents, as I had been doing, quite another thing to meet it face to
face. And then would Mr. Rogers “come across”? Could I talk with him? So
far my attempts to talk with members of the organization had been failures.
I had been met with that formulated chatter used by those who have

accepted a creed, a situation, a system, to baffle the investigator trying to
find out what it all means.
My nervousness and my skepticism fell away when Mr. Rogers stepped
forward in his library to greet me. He was frank and hearty. Plainly he
wanted me to be at ease. In that way he knew that he could soon tell
whether it was worth his while to spend further time on me or not.
Henry Rogers was a man of about sixty at this time, a striking figure, by
all odds the handsomest and most distinguished figure in Wall Street. He
was tall, muscular, lithe as an Indian. There was a trace of the early oil
adventure in his bearing in spite of his air of authority, his excellent
grooming, his manner of the quick-witted naturally adaptable man who has
seen much of people. His big head with its high forehead was set off by a
heavy shock of beautiful gray hair; his nose was aquiline, sensitive. The
mouth, which I fancy must have been flexible, capable both of firm
decision and of gay laughter, was concealed by a white drooping
moustache. His eyes were large and dark, narrowed a little by caution,
capable of blazing as I was to find out, shaded by heavy gray eyebrows
giving distinction and force to his face.
I remember thinking as I tried to get my bearings: Now I understand why
Mark Twain likes him so much. They are alike even in appearance. They
have the bond of early similar experiences—Mark Twain in Nevada, Henry
Rogers in the early oil regions.
“When and where did your interest in oil begin?” Mr. Rogers asked as he
seated me—a full light on my face, I noticed.
“On the flats and hills of Rouseville,” I told him.
“Of course,” he cried, “of course! Tarbell’s Tank Shops. I knew your
father. I could put my finger on the spot where those shops stood.”
We were off. We forgot our serious business and talked of our early days
on the Creek. Mr. Rogers told me how the news of the oil excitement had
drawn him from his boyhood home in New England, how he had found his
way into Rouseville, gone into refining. He had married and put his first
thousand dollars into a home on the hillside adjoining ours.
“It was a little white house,” he said, “with a high peaked roof.”
“Oh, I remember it!” I cried. “The prettiest house in the world, I thought
it.” It was my first approach to the Gothic arch, my first recognition of

beauty in a building.
We reconstructed the geography of our neighborhood, lingering over the
charm of the narrow ravine which separated our hillsides, a path on each
side.
“Up that path,” Mr. Rogers told me, “I used to carry our washing every
Monday morning and go for it every Saturday night. Probably I’ve seen you
hunting flowers on your side of the ravine. How beautiful it was! I was
never happier.”
Could two strangers, each a little wary of the other, have had a more
auspicious beginning for a serious talk? For what followed was serious with
moments of strain.
“What are you basing your story on?” he asked finally.
“On documents. I am beginning with the South Improvement Company.”
He broke in to say: “Well, that of course was an outrageous business.
That is where the Rockefellers made their big mistake.”
I knew of course that Mr. Rogers had fought that early raid tooth and
nail; and I also knew that later he had joined “the conspirators,” as the Oil
Region called them, in carrying out point by point the initial program. But I
did not throw it up to him.
“Why did you not come to us at the start?” Mr. Rogers asked.
“It was unnecessary. You have written your history; besides, it would
have been quite useless,” I told him.
“We’ve changed our policy,” he said. “We are giving out information.”
As a matter of fact Mr. Rogers may be regarded, I think, as the first public
relations counsel of the Standard Oil Company—the forerunner of Ivy Lee
—and I was, so far as I know, the first subject on which the new policy was
tried.
In the close to two hours I spent that afternoon with Henry Rogers we
went over the history of the oil business. We talked of rebates and pipe
lines, independent struggles and failures, the absorption of everything that
touched their ambition. He put their side to me, the mightiness of their
achievement, the perfection of their service. Also he talked of their trials,
the persecution (as he called it) by their rivals, the attack of Lloyd: “I never
understood how Harper could have published that book. Why, I knew Harry
Harper socially.

“There has always been something,” he said a little ruefully. “Look at
things now—Russia and Texas. There seems to be no end of the oil they
have there. How can we control it? It looks as if something had the
Standard Oil Company by the neck, something bigger than we are.”
The more we talked, the more at home I felt with him and the more I
liked him. It was almost like talking with Mr. McClure and Mr. Phillips.
Finally we made a compact. I was to take up with him each case in their
history as I came to it. He was to give me documents, figures, explanations,
and justifications—anything and everything which would enlarge my
understanding and judgment. I realized how big a contribution he would
make if he continued to be as frank as he was in this preliminary talk. I
made it quite clear to him, however, that while I should welcome anything
in the way of information and explanation that he could give, it must be my
judgment, not his, which prevailed.
“Of course, Mr. Rogers,” I told him, “I realize that my judgments may
not stand in the long run; but I shall have to stand or fall by them.”
“Well,” he said as I rose to go, “I suppose we’ll have to stand it. Would
you be willing to come to my office for these talks? It might be a little more
convenient.”
“Certainly,” I replied.
He looked a bit surprised.
“Will you talk with Mr. Rockefeller?”
“Certainly,” I said.
“Well,” he said a little doubtfully, “I’ll try to arrange it.”
For two years our bargain was faithfully kept, I usually going to his
office at 26 Broadway. That in itself at the start, for one as unfamiliar as I
was with the scene and customs of big business, was an adventure. My
entrance and exit to Mr. Rogers’ office were carried on with a secrecy
which never failed to amuse me. The alert, handsome, businesslike little
chaps who received me at the entrance to the Rogers’ suite piloted me
unerringly by a route where nobody saw me and I saw nobody into the
same small room opening on to a court, and it seemed never the same route.
I was not slow in discovering that across the court in the window directly
opposite there was always stationed a gentleman whose head seemed to be

turned my way whenever I looked across. It may have meant nothing at all.
I only record the fact.
The only person besides Mr. Rogers I ever met in those offices was his
private secretary, Miss Harrison: a woman spoken of with awe at that date
as having a $10,000 salary, one who knew her employer’s business from A
to Z and whom he could trust absolutely. She radiated efficiency—business
competency. Along with her competency went that gleam of hardness which
efficient business women rarely escape. Miss Harrison appeared only on
rare occasions when an extra document was needed. She was as impersonal
as the chairs in the room.
We discussed in these interviews, with entire frankness, the laws which
they had flouted. I could not shock Mr. Rogers with records—not even
when I confronted him one day with the testimony he had given on a certain
point which he admitted was not according to the facts. He curtly dismissed
the subject. “They had no business prying into my private affairs.” As for
rebates, “Somebody would have taken them if we had not.”
“But with your strength, Mr. Rogers,” I argued, “you could have forced
fair play on the railroads and on your competitors.”
“Ah,” he said, “but there was always somebody without scruples in
competition, however small that somebody might be. He might grow.”
There it was, the obsession of the Standard Oil Company, that danger
lurked in small as well as great things, that nothing, however trivial, must
live outside of its control.
These talks made me understand as I could not from the documents
themselves the personal point of view of independents like Mr. Rogers who
had been gathered into the organization in the first decade of monopoly
making. For instance, there was Mr. Rogers’ reason for desiring the trust
agreement made in 1882:
“By 1880,” said Mr. Rogers, “I had stock in nearly all of the seventy or
so companies which we had absorbed. But the real status of these
companies was not known to the public. In case of my death there would
have been practically no buyer except Mr. Flagler, Mr. Rockefeller, and a
few others on the inside. My heirs would not have reaped the benefit of my
holdings. The trust agreement changed this. The public at once realized the
value of the trust certificate. That is, my estate was guarded in case of my
death.”

He often emphasized the part economies had played not only in building
up the concern but in their individual fortunes—economies and putting their
money back into the business. “We lived in rented houses and saved money
to buy stock in the company,” he told me once.
Only one who remembers, as I do, the important place that owning your
own home took in the personal economy of the self-respecting individual of
that day can feel the force of this explanation.
I was curious about how he had been able to adjust his well known
passion for speculation with Mr. Rockefeller’s well known antagonism to
all forms of gambling.
“Didn’t he ever object?” I asked.
“Oh,” he said a little ruefully, “I was never a favorite. I suppose I was a
born gambler. In the early days of the Charles Pratt Company, the company
of which I was a member—I always carried on the speculations for the
concern—Mr. Pratt said: ‘Henry, I haven’t got the nerve to speculate. I
kicked all the clothes off last night worrying about the market.’ ‘Give me
the money,’ I told him, ‘and I will furnish the nerve.’ We simply raked in the
money”—making a gesture with both hands. “And of course it came out of
the producer.”
“That is what my father always said,” I told him. “One of the severest
lectures he ever gave came from one of those booms in the market which
sent everybody in the Oil Region crazy. I suppose you were responsible for
it. I remember a day when the schools were practically closed because all
the teachers in Titusville were on the street or in the Oil Exchange—
everybody speculating. I was in high school; the fever caught me, and I
asked father for $100 to try my luck in the market. He was as angry with me
as I ever saw him. ‘No daughter of mine,’ he said, etc., etc.”
“Wise man,” Mr. Rogers commented.
“But it was not because he was so cautious,” I said. “It was because he
thought it was morally wrong. He would no more have speculated in the
stock market than he would have played poker for money.”
“I always play poker when the market is closed,” commented Mr.
Rogers. “I can’t help it. Saturday afternoons I almost always make up a
poker party, and every now and then John Gates and I rig up something.

He’ll come around and say, ‘Henry, isn’t it about time we started
something?’ We usually do.”
All of these talks were informal, natural. We even argued with entire
friendliness the debatable question, “What is the worst thing the Standard
Oil Company ever did?” Only now and then did one of us flare, and then
the other generally changed the subject.
“He’s a liar and hypocrite, and you know it,” I exploded one day when
we were talking of a man who had led in what to me was a particularly
odious operation.
“I think it is going to rain,” said Mr. Rogers, looking out of the window
with ostentatious detachment.
Mr. Rogers not only produced documents and arguments; he produced
people with whom I wanted to talk. The most important was Henry Flagler,
who had been in on the South Improvement Company, that early deal with
the railroads which had started the Standard Oil Company off on the road to
monopoly. There had always been a controversy as to who had suggested
that fine scheme. Mr. Flagler was in it. What did he know? Mr. Rogers
arranged that I talk with him.
Henry Flagler was not an acceptable figure even to Wall Street in those
days. There were scandals of his private life which, true or not, his fellow
financiers did not like. Bad for business. I found him a very different type
from Henry Rogers. He, for instance, did not conceal his distrust of John
Rockefeller. “He would do me out of a dollar today,” he cried, off his guard,
and with an excited smash of his fist on the table; and then, catching
himself and with a remarkable change of tone: “That is, if he could do it
honestly, Miss Tarbell, if he could do it honestly.”
Mr. Flagler knew what I had come for, but instead of answering my direct
questions he began to tell me with some show of emotion of his own early
life, how he had left home because his father was a poor clergyman—$400
a year, a large family of children. He had not succeeded until he went into
the commission business with Mr. Rockefeller in Cleveland. “And from that
time we were prospered,” he said piously. In the long story he told me, the
phrase, “We were prospered,” came in again and again. That was not what I
was after. Their prosperity was obvious enough. Finally I returned with
some irritation to the object of my visit.

“I see you do not know or are unwilling to say, Mr. Flagler, who
originated the South Improvement Company; but this is certain: Mr.
Rockefeller had the credit of it in the Oil Region. You know, yourself, how
bitter the feeling was there.”
“But, ah, Miss Tarbell,” he said, “how often the reputation of a man in his
lifetime differs from his real character! Take the greatest character in our
history. How different was our Lord and Saviour regarded when he was
alive from what we now know him to have been!”
After that, further questioning was of course hopeless, and until Mr.
Rogers returned I sat listening to the story of how the Lord had prospered
him. I never was happier to leave a room, but I was no happier than Mr.
Flagler was to have me go.
Mr. Rogers produced Mr. Flagler and others of lesser importance. But
although I referred to his semi-promise in our first interview to produce Mr.
Rockefeller I found that after a few months there was no hope of this. If I
hinted at it he parried.
Nearly a year went by after my first interview with Mr. Rogers before the
articles began to appear. I rather expected him to cut me off when he
realized that I was trying to prove that the Standard Oil Company was only
an enlarged South Improvement Company. But to my surprise my
arguments did not seem to disturb him. They had won out, had they not? He
sometimes complained that I had been unnecessarily blunt or a bit
vindictive, but he continued to receive me in friendly fashion and to give
me, perhaps not all the help he might, but always something to make me
think twice, frequently to modify a view.
But if he was not himself disturbed by what I was doing why did he
continue the interviews? Gradually I became convinced it was because of
his interest in my presentation of a particular episode in their history. It was
a case in which Mr. Rogers and John Archbold, along with all of the
members of the board of a subsidiary company, the Vacuum Oil Company
of Rochester, New York, had been indicted for conspiring to destroy an
independent refinery in Buffalo, New York.
In my opening interview with Mr. Rogers he with some show of feeling
had told me he wanted me to get a correct and impartial version of this
Buffalo case, as he always called it. There had been a break in his voice
when with hesitation he said: “That case is a sore point with Mr. Archbold

and me. I want you to go into it thoroughly. I have the reports of the
testimony before the grand jury; it took me months to secure them. Of
course in a sense I have no right with them. I told my children that if their
father’s memory is ever attacked this will serve to vindicate him. He must
stand or fall in their estimation by that testimony.”
At our second interview he produced the testimony before the grand jury,
repeating again that of course he had no business with it but he had to have
it. He would not allow me to take it away, and at his request I read the sixty
or more pages in his presence. It seemed quite clear to me, as I told Mr.
Rogers on finishing the reading, that his connection with the affair had been
so indirect that there was no reason for his indictment, although it seemed
equally clear to me that there was ample reason for the indictment of certain
members of the Vacuum board. The judge was of that opinion, for he
dismissed the indictment against Mr. Rogers and two of his fellow directors
while sustaining that against the responsible operating heads of the concern.
I soon discovered that what Mr. Rogers wanted me to make out was that
the three men who had founded the independent enterprise, all of them
former employees of the Vacuum Oil Company, had done so for the sole
purpose of forcing the Standard to buy them out at a high price; that is, that
it was a case of planned blackmail. But the testimony certainly showed little
evidence of that while it did show clearly enough that the managers of the
Vacuum Oil Company, from the hour they had learned of the undertaking,
had made deliberate and open attempts to prevent the Buffalo refinery
doing business.
The more thoroughly I went into the matter—and I worked hard over it—
the more convinced I was that, while there had been bad faith and various
questionable practices on the part of members of the independent firm, they
had started out to build up a business of their own. Also it was clear they
had had hardly a shadow of success under the grilling opposition of the
Standard concern. This included various suits for infringement of patents,
all of which the Standard had lost. In course of the years of litigation four
juries—two grand juries and two petit juries—gave verdicts against the
Standard Oil Company.
Finally the independent concern was so shot to pieces by the continuous
bombardment that it had to be put into the hands of a receiver. The Standard

offered to settle for $85,000, and the judge ordered the acceptance. This
made it the owner of the bone of contention.
I had a feeling that my final conclusion in the matter would probably end
my relations with Mr. Rogers. I did not want to spring that conclusion on
him, that is, I wanted him to know ahead of publication where I had come
out. Although I had never allowed him to read an article before its
appearance, that being part of the original compact, I broke my rule in this
case. Promptly I received a letter asking me to call at 26 Broadway. He
received me in his usual cordial way and told me he had gone over my
article carefully, compared it with certain papers in his possession and had
written me a letter in which he had stated his criticisms.
Handing me the letter, he said, “I think it will be a good plan for you to
read that out loud, so that we can talk it over here.”
I began to read, but broke off with the first sentence. Mr. Rogers had
written that he appreciated my request that he should make the story
correspond with his knowledge and opinion of the case.
“Mr. Rogers,” I said, “if you will look at my letter you will see that I did
not suggest that you make the article correspond with your opinion of this
case. I am convinced that I cannot do that. I asked you to examine the
article and see if I had made any errors in statement or had omitted any
essential testimony on either side.”
He smiled. “Never mind, go ahead,” he said.
The letter was admirable, almost every point well taken. There was
nothing which it was not proper for me to consider at least, and with certain
of his points I said at once that I was willing to comply. The discussion of
the letter finished, I inwardly breathed a sigh of satisfaction. We were going
to part on friendly terms with neither of us having yielded our convictions.
But I had not counted on the resources of Henry Rogers in a matter in
which he was deeply concerned, particularly one which touched his
personal pride and aroused his fighting spirit. For as I was about to go he
sprang on me an entirely new interpretation of the case. Not only was the
suit of the independent refinery in which he had been indicted a
continuation of the original blackmailing scheme, but the lawyers in the
case had themselves been in the conspiracy. He laid before me a number of
documents which he claimed proved it. The chief of these was the itemized
report of the receiver. This report, he said, showed that the lawyers had

taken the case knowing that if the Buffalo concern did not win there would
be no fees, and showed that when the matter had finally been settled they
had made what the receiver considered exorbitant claims for their services.
There were five of them, and they finally were allowed some thirty
thousand dollars.
“You can see,” Mr. Rogers said as he pointed out these facts, “why they
were so eager to convict us. They were making a raid on the Standard, and
the bench was with them.”
His charge that the bench was with them, he based on the fact that two of
the lawyers originally in the case had later been elevated to the bench. They
had not of course heard the case, but they had put their information and
conclusions at the disposal of their successors.
I was startled by this sudden and sinister accusation and sat for some time
with my head bent over the papers, forgetting his presence, trying to get at
the meaning of the documents. Was there any other explanation than that
which Mr. Rogers had given me with such conviction? Looking up
suddenly for the first time in my experience with Mr. Rogers, I caught him
looking at me with narrowed and cunning eyes. I took alarm on the instant.
“We are not the only ones, you see, Miss Tarbell.”
“If this means what it seems to mean you are not. But I shall have to
study these documents, Mr. Rogers; I shall have to consult a lawyer about
the practice common in such cases.”
“That will be all right,” he said.
He was more exultant than I had ever found him. “I knew that paper
would come in well some day. To get it I consented to our people buying
the Buffalo refinery—we did not want it, but I wanted to get the receiver’s
reports and know just what had been done with the money we had paid
them.”
On the whole I had never seen him better pleased with himself than he
was at that moment. His satisfaction was so great that for the first time in
our acquaintance he gave me a little lecture for a caustic remark I had made.
“That is not a Christian remark,” he said. I contended that it was a perfect
expression of my notion of a Christian.
“You ought to go to church more frequently,” he said. “Why don’t you
come and hear my pastor, Dr. Savage?”

We parted on good terms after a discussion of our religious views and
churchgoing practices, and he gave me a cordial invitation to come back,
which I agreed to do as soon as I had studied the new angle in the Buffalo
case.
Aided by a disinterested and fair-minded lawyer, I gave a thorough study
to the documents; but do my best I could not convince myself that Mr.
Rogers’ contention was sound. It is not an unusual thing for lawyers to take
cases they believe in, knowing that their compensation depends on their
winning. Many clients with just cases would be deprived of counsel if they
had to insure a fixed compensation, for not infrequently, as in the Buffalo
case, all that a client has is involved in a suit. The practice is so common
among reputable lawyers that it certainly cannot be regarded as a proof of a
conspiracy, unless there is a reason to suppose that they have taken a case of
whose merits they themselves are suspicious. There was no evidence that
the counsel of the independent concern were not convinced from the first
that they had a strong case. Their claims were large; but lawyers are not
proverbial for the modesty of their charges and, besides, exorbitant charges
can hardly be construed as a proof of conspiracy.
When I finally had written out my conclusion I sent a copy of it to Mr.
Rogers, saying I should be glad to talk it over with him if he wished. He did
wish—wrote me that he had new material to present. But before the date set
for the meeting an article in our series was published which broke off our
friendly relations.
In studying the testimony of independents over a period of some thirty
years I had found repeated complaints that their oil shipments were
interfered with, their cars side-tracked en route while pressure was brought
on buyers to cancel orders. There were frequent charges that freight clerks
were reporting independent shipments.
I did not take the matter seriously at first. The general suspicion of
Standard dealings by independents had to be taken into consideration, I told
myself. Then, too, I was willing to admit that a certain amount of attention
to what your competitor is doing is considered legitimate business practice.
I knew that in the office of McClure’s Magazine we were very keen to know
what other publishers were doing. And, too, there is the overzealous and
unscrupulous employee who in the name of competition recognizes no rules
for his game.

But the charges continued to multiply. I met them in testimony, and I met
them in interviews. There was no escaping espionage, men told me. “They
know where we send every barrel of oil. Half the time our oil never reaches
its destination.” I could scarcely believe it. And then unexpectedly there
came to my desk a mass of incontrovertible proofs that what I had been
hearing was true and more. As a matter of fact this system of following up
independent oil shipments was letter-perfect, so perfect that it was made a
matter of office bookkeeping.
“It looks sometimes,” Mr. Rogers had said to me, “as if something had
the Standard Oil Company by the neck, something bigger than we are.”
In this case the something bigger was a boy’s conscience. A lad of sixteen
or seventeen in the office of a Standard plant had as one of his regular
monthly duties the burning of large quantities of records. He had carried out
his orders for many months without attention to the content. Then suddenly
his eyes fell one night on the name of a man who had been his friend since
childhood, had even been his Sunday-school teacher, an independent oil
refiner in the city, a Standard competitor. The boy began to take notice; he
discovered that the name appeared repeatedly on different forms and in the
letters which he was destroying. It made him uneasy, and he began to piece
the records together. It was not long before he saw to his distress that the
concern for which he was working was getting from the railroad offices of
the town full information about every shipment that his friend was making;
moreover, that the office was writing to its representative in the territory to
which the independent oil was going, “Stop that shipment—get that trade.”
And the correspondence showed how both were done.
What was a youth to do under such circumstances? He didn’t do anything
at first, but finally when he could not sleep nights for thinking about it he
gathered up a full set of documents and secretly took them to his friend.
Now this particular oil refiner had been reading the McClure’s articles.
He had become convinced that I was trying to deal fairly with the matter; he
had also convinced himself in some way that I was to be trusted. So one
night he brought me the full set of incriminating documents. There was no
doubt about their genuineness. The most interesting to me was the way they
fitted in with the testimony scattered through the investigations and
lawsuits. Here were bookkeeping records explaining every accusation that
had been made. But how could I use them? Together we worked out a plan

by which the various forms and blanks could be reproduced with fictitious
names of persons and places substituted for the originals.
It was after this material had come to my hands that I took the subject up
with Mr. Rogers. “The original South Improvement Company formula, Mr.
Rogers, provided for reports of independent shipments from the railroads. I
have come on repeated charges that the practice continues. What about it?
Do you follow independent shipments? Do you stop them? Do you have the
help of railroad shipping clerks in the operation?”
“Of course we do everything we legally and fairly can to find out what
our competitors are doing, just as you do in McClure’s Magazine,” Mr.
Rogers answered. “But as for any such system of tracking and stopping, as
you suggest, that is nonsense. How could we do it even if we would?”
“Well,” I said, “give me everything you have on this point.”
He said he had nothing more than what he had already told me.
As I have said, the article came out just before I was to see Mr. Rogers on
what I hoped would be the last of the Buffalo case. The only time in all my
relations with him when I saw his face white with rage was when I met the
appointment he had made. Our interview was short.
“Where did you get that stuff?” he said angrily, pointing to the magazine
on the table.
All I could say was in substance: “Mr. Rogers, you can’t for a moment
think that I would tell you where I got it. You will recall my efforts to get
from you anything more than a general denial that these practices of
espionage so long complained of were untrue, could be explained by
legitimate competition. You know this bookkeeping record is true.”
There were a few curt exchanges about other points in the material, but
nothing as I now recall on the Buffalo case. The article ended my visits to
26 Broadway.
Nearly four years passed before I saw Henry Rogers, and in that period
exciting and tragic events had come his way.
There was the copper war. He and his friends had attempted to build up a
monopoly in copper to match that of the Standard Oil Company in
petroleum, the Amalgamated Copper Company. A youngster, F. Augustus
Heinze, had come into Montana, and by bold and ruthless operation put
together a copper company of his own. The two organizations were soon at

each other’s throats. It was a business war without a vestige of decency, one
in which every devious device of the law and of politics was resorted to by
both sides.
But Mr. Rogers had other troubles. He and his friends had been engaged
in organizing the gas interests of the East. They had engineered stock raids
which had been as disastrous to Wall Street as to gambling Main Street.
Such operations in the past had never cost him more than a passing angry
comment by the public press. Now, however, came something damaging to
his reputation and his pride. It was a series of lurid articles by a bold and
very-much-on-the-inside broker and speculator—Thomas Lawson of
Boston. For nearly two years Lawson published monthly in Everybody’s
Magazine under the admirable title “Frenzied Finance” circumstantial
accounts of the speculation of the Rogers group and what they had cost
their dupes. That story cut Mr. Rogers’ pride to the quick. He is said to have
threatened the American News Company with destruction if it circulated the
magazine.
Taken all together the excitement and anger were too much for even his
iron frame and indomitable spirit, and in the summer of 1907 he suffered a
stroke which put him out of the fight for many weeks. When he came back
it was at once to collide with the Government suit against the Standard Oil
Company, and soon after that with the “rich man’s panic” of 1907, a panic
for which his old enemy in copper, F. Augustus Heinze, was largely
responsible.
Early in November, when the panic was still raiding the banks and the
millionaires of the country, I stood one day at a corner on Fifth Avenue
waiting for the traffic to clear. Suddenly I saw an arm waving to me from a
slowly passing open automobile, and there was H. H. Rogers smiling at me
in the friendliest way.
When I reported the encounter at the office Mr. Phillips at once said:
“Why not try to see him? If he’ll talk about what is going on, what a
story he could tell!”
But would he see me? I was a little dubious about trying. Still the
greeting and the smile seemed to mean that at least he harbored no ill will.
Suppose, I said, he is sufficiently subdued to go over with me his exciting
life. What a document of big business in the eighties and nineties he could
produce if he would put down his recollections with the frankness with

which he had sometimes talked to me! It seemed worth trying for, and I
asked for an appointment. I had not made a mistake. Mr. Rogers was
harboring no ill will. I was promptly invited to come to his house. He
greeted me heartily. I found him physically changed, stouter, less sinewy,
but quite as frank as ever. He told me of his stroke; he spoke bitterly of
what he called the Roosevelt panic as well as of Roosevelt’s interference
with the business of the Standard Oil Company. He gave me my cue when
he began to talk about the early days of the Oil Region. “There is a whole
chapter,” he said, “that has not been written, that from ’59 to ’72.”
We were getting on swimmingly when our interview was cut short by a
card handed him—Joseph Seep, the head of the Standard Oil Purchasing
Agency. It amused him greatly that Mr. Seep should have come in while I
was there.
“Now you’ll have to go,” he said, and he put me out by a circuitous
route. As at 26 Broadway callers were not to see one another.
As we came into a dark hall he turned on the light. “You see we have to
economize now,” he said laughingly. Our good-bye was cordial. “We’ll talk
about this again,” he said. “Call up Miss Harrison in a week or ten days,
and we’ll make an appointment.”
The appointment was never made. The coming months were too difficult
for Mr. Rogers. His vast business affairs continued complicated; the legend
of his invincibility in the market was weakened. Moreover, such was the
bitterness of the Standard Oil Company over the Government suit that I
doubt if he or his associates would have considered it wise for him to talk to
me. They probably thought he had talked already too much to too little
purpose. They—and he probably—never understood how much he had
done to make me realize the legitimate greatness of the Standard Oil
Company, how much he had done to make me understand better the
vastness and complexity of its problems and the amazing grasp with which
it dealt with them.
Their complaint against me, Mr. Rogers’ complaint, was that I had never
been able to submerge my contempt for their illegitimate practices in my
admiration for their genius in organization, the boldness of their
imagination and execution. But my contempt had increased rather than
diminished as I worked.

I never had an animus against their size and wealth, never objected to
their corporate form. I was willing that they should combine and grow as
big and rich as they could, but only by legitimate means. But they had never
played fair, and that ruined their greatness for me. I am convinced that their
brilliant example has contributed not only to a weakening of the country’s
moral standards but to its economic unsoundness. The experience of the last
decade particularly seems to me to amply justify my conviction.
I was never to see Mr. Rogers again, for in May of 1909 he suddenly died
—two years before the Supreme Court dissolved the Standard Oil
Company.

12
MUCKRAKER OR HISTORIAN?

It was inevitable that my visits to 26 Broadway should be noised among
critics and enemies of the Standard Oil Company curious about what
McClure’s was going to do. It was not infrequent for some one on the
independent side to say with a wise nod of the head: “Oh, they’ll get around
you. You’ll become their apologist before you get through.” It was quite
useless for me to insist that I was trying to be nobody’s apologist, that I was
trying to balance what I found. At least two people of importance whose
experiences I was anxious to hear from their own lips refused to see me. I
learned later that Henry D. Lloyd had written them after he learned I was
seeing Mr. Rogers that they had better not talk, better not show me their
papers, that inevitably I should be taken in.
Now I had already talked with Mr. Lloyd, already had help from him, but
the Rogers association evidently upset him for a time. My first article
seemed to reassure him, for he wrote me at once on its appearance: “I read
your first installment of the story of the Standard Oil Company with eager
curiosity, then intense interest and then great satisfaction.” He seems to
have divined at once where I was heading.
The suspicion of my relations with 26 Broadway cut me off for some two
years from one of the most interesting independent warriors in the thirty
years’ struggle. This was one Lewis Emery, Jr., whom I had known from
childhood. He had grown up in the oil business, side by side with H. H.
Rogers; he had been a producer and a refiner as well as one of the powerful
factors in building up the Pure Oil Company, the integrated concern in
which my brother was carrying on. From the start Mr. Emery had fought the
Standard’s pretensions, individually and collectively, politically and
financially. He had a gift for language—a marvelous vituperative

vocabulary—and he had no restraint in using it. He was a feature of almost
every investigation, every lawsuit, a member of every combination of
producers and refiners. Where he was, there were sure to be lively
exchanges between him and the representatives of the other side. His
particular abomination was John Archbold, vice president of the Standard
Oil Company, a person as free with charges and epithets as Lewis Emery
himself.
“You are a liar,” he shouted one day in an investigation when Mr. Emery
had made an exaggerated charge.
Joseph H. Choate was Mr. Archbold’s lawyer.
“There, there, Mr. Archbold!” he said. “We’ll put Mr. Emery on the stand
and convict him of perjury.”
Without noticing Mr. Choate’s remark Mr. Emery called across the table,
“Young man, if this table wasn’t so wide I would tweak your nose for that.”
Such exchanges were not infrequent.
Henry Rogers, who really liked Lewis Emery, was always trying to calm
him down. “Can’t you stop this, Lew?” he said one day. “Come with us, and
it will be better for you. There is no hope for you alone, but with us there is
a sure thing.”
Mr. Emery, who told me of this offer, said: “Henry, I can’t do it even if I
wanted to. They would mob me in the Oil Region if I went back on them.”
They would not have mobbed him, but they would have done what would
have been worse for a man of his temperament, his passion for free action
whether wise or unwise—they would have ostracized him.
The most tragic effect I had seen in my girlhood of “going over to the
Standard,” as it was called, was partial ostracism of the renegade. When a
man’s old associates crossed to the other side of the street rather than meet
him, when nobody stopped him on the street corner to gossip over what was
going on, few men were calloused enough not to suffer. It was worse than
mobbing. The Oil Region as a matter of fact never mobbed any man so far
as I know, though it did occasionally destroy property and once at least
hung Mr. Rockefeller himself in effigy.
By this time Lewis Emery had fought his way to a substantial position in
the oil world; but to the end he prided himself on being a victim. When he
finally talked to me after he learned from Mr. Lloyd that the embargo

against me had been raised, he said, with what seemed to me considerable
satisfaction: “I have been tortured. I am a wounded man because of them,
and I hate them.”
In spite of this he was getting a good deal out of life. He was a rich man,
and he was making the most of his money. He never let money stifle his
personality. His success in being himself was in striking contrast to that of
most of the successful oil men of that day whom I knew. Most of them,
independent and Standard, submitted to an application of veneer, a change
of habits which destroyed much of their natural flavor. They took little part
in politics and social agitation; they remained regular in all things; they
made their investments only in sure enterprises. You knew always where to
find them. But not so Lewis Emery, Jr. He continued to wear his clothes
naturally, to go on his own erratic way. He threw himself into political
movements, wise and unwise, and he never lost his pioneering spirit. After
he was seventy years old, as a final fling, he took on a gold mine in Peru, a
gold mine which was reached by climbing mountains and descending
narrow paths cut out of rock, crossing swaying rope bridges—approaches
fit only for the most daring mountain climbers. Yet there he was when
nearly eighty charging up and down those mountains and trotting his mule
across those bridges when younger men led their mules and crept.
The degree to which he was reconciled to me after two years of ostracism
was proved by his annual invitation to come along to Peru with his party.
And I would have gone and told the story of his mine as he wanted me to do
if it had not been for the pictures he sent me—those pictures of unprotected
swaying bridges suspended from mountain side to mountain side, hundreds
of feet above the rushing rocky streams. I had not the head for that, and so
gave up what would have been, I am sure, one of the most amusing
adventures that ever came my way.
Not a few of the personal experiences in gathering my materials left me
with unhappy impressions, more unhappy in retrospect perhaps than they
were at the moment. They were part of the day’s work, sometimes very
exciting parts. There was the two hours I spent in studying Mr. John D.
Rockefeller. As the work had gone on, it became more and more clear to me
that the Standard Oil Company was his creation. “An institution is the
lengthened shadow of one man,” says Emerson. I found it so.

Everybody in the office interested in the work began to say, “After the
book is done you must do a character sketch of Mr. Rockefeller.” I was not
keen for it. It would have to be done like the books, from documents; that
is, I had no inclination to use the extraordinary gossip which came to me
from many sources. If I were to do it I wanted only that of which I felt I had
sure proof, only those things which seemed to me to help explain the public
life of this powerful, patient, secretive, calculating man of so peculiar and
special a genius.
“You must at least look at Mr. Rockefeller,” my associates insisted. “But
how?” Mr. Rogers himself had suggested that I see him. I had consented. I
had returned to the suggestion several times, but at last was made to
understand that it could not be done. I had dropped his name from my list. It
was John Siddall who then took the matter in hand.
“You must see him,” was Siddall’s judgment.
To arrange it became almost an obsession. And then what seemed to him
like a providential opening came. It was announced that on a certain Sunday
of October 1903 Mr. Rockefeller before leaving Cleveland, where he had
spent his summer, for his home in New York would say good-bye in a little
talk to the Sunday school of his church—a rally, it was called. As soon as
Siddall learned of this he begged me to come on. “We can go to Sunday
school; we can stay to church. I will see that we have seats where we will
have a full view of the man. You will get him in action.”
Of course I went, feeling a little mean about it too. He had not wanted to
be seen apparently. It was taking him unaware.
Siddall’s plan worked to perfection, worked so well from the start that
again and again he seemed ready to burst from excitement in the two hours
we spent in the church.
We had gone early to the Sunday-school room where the rally was to
open—a dismal room with a barbaric dark green paper with big gold
designs, cheap stained-glass windows, awkward gas fixtures. Comfortable,
of course, but so stupidly ugly. We were sitting meekly at one side when I
was suddenly aware of a striking figure standing in the doorway. There was
an awful age in his face—the oldest man I had ever seen, I thought, but
what power! At that moment Siddall poked me violently in the ribs and
hissed, “There he is.”

The impression of power deepened when Mr. Rockefeller took off his
coat and hat, put on a skullcap, and took a seat commanding the entire
room, his back to the wall. It was the head which riveted attention. It was
big, great breadth from back to front, high broad forehead, big bumps
behind the ears, not a shiny head but with a wet look. The skin was as fresh
as that of any healthy man about us. The thin sharp nose was like a thorn.
There were no lips; the mouth looked as if the teeth were all shut hard.
Deep furrows ran down each side of the mouth from the nose. There were
puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running from them.
Wonder over the head was almost at once diverted to wonder over the
man’s uneasiness. His eyes were never quiet but darted from face to face,
even peering around the jog at the audience close to the wall.
When he rose to speak, the impression of power that the first look at him
had given increased, and the impression of age passed. I expected a
quavering voice, but the voice was not even old, if a little fatigued, a little
thin. It was clear and utterly sincere. He meant what he was saying. He was
on his own ground talking about dividends, dividends of righteousness. “If
you would take something out,” he said, clenching the hand of his
outstretched right arm, “you must put something in”—emphasizing “put
something in” with a long outstretched forefinger.
The talk over, we slipped out to get a good seat in the gallery, a seat
where we could look full on what we knew to be the Rockefeller pew.
Mr. Rockefeller came into the auditorium of the church as soon as
Sunday school was out. He sat a little bent in his pew, pitifully uneasy, his
head constantly turning to the farthest right or left, his eyes searching the
faces almost invariably turned towards him. It was plain that he, and not the
minister, was the pivot on which that audience swung. Probably he knew
practically everybody in the congregation; but now and then he lingered on
a face, peering at it intently as if he were seeking what was in the mind
behind it. He looked frequently at the gallery. Was it at Siddall and me?
The services over, he became the friendly patron saint of the flock.
Coming down the aisle where people were passing out, he shook hands with
everyone who stopped, saying, “A good sermon.” “The Doctor gave us a
good sermon.” “It was a very good sermon, wasn’t it?”
My two hours’ study of Mr. Rockefeller aroused a feeling I had not
expected, which time has intensified. I was sorry for him. I know no

companion so terrible as fear. Mr. Rockefeller, for all the conscious power
written in face and voice and figure, was afraid, I told myself, afraid of his
own kind. My friend Lewis Emery, Jr., priding himself on being a victim,
was free and happy. Not gold enough in the world to tempt him to exchange
his love of defiance for a power which carried with it a head as uneasy as
that on Mr. Rockefeller’s shoulders.
My unhappiness was increased as the months went by with the
multiplying of tales of grievances coming from every direction. I made a
practice of looking into them all, as far as I could; and while frequently I
found solid reasons for the complaints, frequently I found the basic motives
behind them—suspicion, hunger for notoriety, blackmail, revenge.
The most unhappy and most unnatural of these grievances came to me
from literally the last person in the world to whom I should have looked for
information—Frank Rockefeller—brother of John D. Rockefeller.
Frank Rockefeller sent word to me by a circuitous route that he had
documents in a case which he thought ought to be made public, and that if I
would secretly come to him in his office in Cleveland he would give them
to me. I knew that there had been a quarrel over property between the two
men. It made much noise at the time—1893—had gone to the courts, had
caused bitterness inside the family itself; but because it was a family affair I
had not felt that I wanted to touch it. But here it was laid on my desk.
So I went to Cleveland, where John Siddall had a grand opportunity to
play the role of sleuth which he so enjoyed, his problem being to get me
into Mr. Rockefeller’s office without anybody suspecting my identity. He
succeeded.
I found Mr. Rockefeller excited and vindictive. He accused his brother of
robbing (his word) him and his partner James Corrigan of all their
considerable holdings of stock in the Standard Oil Company. The bare facts
were that Frank Rockefeller and James Corrigan had been interested in the
early Standard Oil operations in Cleveland and had each acquired then a
substantial block of stock. Later they had developed a shipping business on
the Lakes, iron and steel furnaces in Cleveland. In the eighties they had
borrowed money from John D. Rockefeller, putting up their Standard Oil
stock as collateral. Then came the panic of ’93, and they could not meet
their obligations. In the middle of their distress John Rockefeller had
foreclosed, taking over their stocks, leaving them, so they charged, no time

in which to turn around although they felt certain that they would be able a
little later, out of the substantial business they claimed they had built up, to
pay their debt to him. Their future success proved they could have done so.
I could see John Rockefeller’s point as I talked with his brother Frank.
Frank Rockefeller was an open-handed, generous trader—more interested
in the game than in the money to be made. He loved good horses—raised
them, I believe, on a farm out in Kansas; he liked gaiety, free spending.
From his brother John’s point of view he was not a safe man to handle
money. He did not reverence it; he used it in frivolous ways of which his
brother did not approve. So it was as a kind of obligation to the sacredness
of money that John Rockefeller had foreclosed on his own brother and his
early friend James Corrigan. He was strictly within his legal rights and
within what I suppose he called his moral right.
But the transaction left a bitterness in Frank Rockefeller’s heart and mind
which was one of the ugliest things I have ever seen. “I have taken up my
children from the Rockefeller family lot. [Or “shall take up”—I do not
know now which it was.] They shall not lie in the same enclosure with John
D. Rockefeller.”
The documents in this case, which I later analyzed for the character
sketch on which we had decided, present a fair example of what were
popularly called “Standard Oil methods” as well as what they could do to
the minds and hearts of victims.
The more intimately I went into my subject, the more hateful it became
to me. No achievement on earth could justify those methods, I felt. I had a
great desire to end my task, hear no more of it. No doubt part of my
revulsion was due to a fagged brain. The work had turned out to be much
longer and more laborious than I had had reason to expect.
The plan I had taken to Mr. McClure in the fall of 1890, which we had
talked over in Salsomaggiore, Italy—I still have notes of our talk on a
yellow piece of the stationery of the Hôtel des Thermes—called for three
papers, possibly twenty-five thousand words. But before we actually began
publication Mr. Phillips and Mr. McClure decided we might venture on six.
We went through the six, and the series was stretched to twelve. Before we
were through we had nineteen articles, and when the nineteen were off my
hands I asked nothing in the world but to get them into a book and escape
into the safe retreat of a library where I could study people long dead, and if

they did things of which I did not approve it would be all between me and
the books. There would be none of these harrowing human beings
confronting me, tearing me between contempt and pity, admiration and
anger, baffling me with their futile and misdirected power or their equally
futile and misdirected weakness. I was willing to study human beings in the
library but no longer, for a time at least, in flesh and blood, so I thought.
The book was published in the fall of 1904—two fat volumes with
generous appendices of what I considered essential documents. I was
curious about the reception it would have from the Standard Oil Company. I
had been told repeatedly they were preparing an answer to flatten me out;
but if this was under way it was not with Mr. Rockefeller’s consent, I
imagined. To a mutual friend who had told him the articles should be
answered Mr. Rockefeller was said to have replied: “Not a word. Not a
word about that misguided woman.” To another who asked him about my
charges he was reported as answering: “All without foundation. The idea of
the Standard forcing anyone to sell his refinery is absurd. The refineries
wanted to sell to us, and nobody that has sold or worked with us but has
made money, is glad he did so.
“I thought once of having an answer made to the McClure articles but
you know it has always been the policy of the Standard to keep silent under
attack and let their acts speak for themselves.”
In the case of the Lloyd book they had kept silent, but only because Mr.
Rockefeller had been unable to carry out his plans for answering. What he
had proposed was a jury of the most distinguished clergymen of the day to
consider Mr. Lloyd’s argument and charges. Certain clergymen invited
refused unless there should be a respectable number of economists added to
the jury. That, apparently, Mr. Rockefeller did not see his way to do, and the
plan was abandoned. So far as I know Mr. Lloyd’s book was never
answered by the Standard Oil Company.
But I wanted an answer from Mr. Rockefeller. What I got was neither
direct nor, from my point of view, serious. It consisted of wide and what
must have been a rather expensive anonymous distribution of various
critical comments. The first of these was a review of the book which
appeared in the Nation soon after its publication. The writer—one of the
Nation’s staff reviewers, I later learned—sneered at the idea that there was
anything unusual in the competitive practices which I called illegal and

immoral. “They are a necessary part of competition,” he said. “The
practices are odious it is true, competition is necessarily odious.” Was it
necessarily odious?
I did not think so. The practices I believed I had proved, I continued to
consider much more dangerous to economic stability than airing them, even
if I aired them in the excited and irrational fashion the review charged. As I
saw it, the struggle was between Commercial Machiavellism and the
Christian Code.
The most important of the indirect answers was an able book by Gilbert
Holland Montague. It separated business and ethics in a way that must have
been a comfort to 26 Broadway.
As soon as published, Mr. Montague’s book became not exactly a best
seller but certainly a best circulator—libraries, ministers, teachers,
prominent citizens all over the land receiving copies with the compliments
of the publisher. Numbers of them came back to me with irritated letters.
“We have been buying books for years from this house,” wrote one
distinguished librarian, “and never before was one sent with their
compliments. I understand that libraries all over the country are receiving
them. Can it be that this is intended as an advertisement, or is it not more
probable that the Standard Oil Company itself is paying for this widespread
distribution?”
The general verdict seemed to be that the latter was the explanation.
Some time later there came from the entertaining Elbert Hubbard of the
Roycroft Shop of East Aurora, New York, an essay on the Standard
extolling the grand results from the centralization of the industry in their
hands.
I have it from various interested sources that five million copies were
ordered printed in pamphlet form by the Standard Oil Company and were
distributed by Mr. Hubbard. They went to schoolteachers and journalists,
preachers and “leaders” from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Hardly were they
received in many cases before they were sent to me with angry or approving
comments. For a couple of years my birthday and Christmas offerings were
sure to include copies of one or the other of these documents with the
compliments of some waggish member of the McClure group.
I had hoped that the book might be received as a legitimate historical
study, but to my chagrin I found myself included in a new school, that of

the muckrakers. Theodore Roosevelt, then President of the United States,
had become uneasy at the effect on the public of the periodical press’s
increasing criticisms and investigations of business and political abuses. He
was afraid that they were adding to the not inconsiderable revolutionary
fever abroad, driving people into socialism. Something must be done, and
in a typically violent speech he accused the school of being concerned only
with the “vile and debasing.” Its members were like the man in John
Bunyan’s “Pilgrim’s Progress” who with eyes on the ground raked
incessantly “the straws, the small sticks, and dust of the floor.” They were
muckrakers. The conservative public joyfully seized the name.
Roosevelt had of course misread his Bunyan. The man to whom the
Interpreter called the attention of the Pilgrim was raking riches which the
Interpreter contemptuously called “straws” and “sticks” and “dust.” The
president would have been nearer Bunyan’s meaning if he had named the
rich sinners of the times who in his effort to keep his political balance he
called “malefactors of great wealth”—if he had called them, “muckrakers of
great wealth” and applied the word “malefactors” to the noisy and persistent
writers who so disturbed him.
I once argued with Mr. Roosevelt that we on McClure’s were concerned
only with facts, not with stirring up revolt. “I don’t object to the facts,” he
cried, “but you and Baker”—Baker at that time was carrying on an able
series of articles on the manipulations of the railroads—“but you and Baker
are not practical.”
I felt at the time Mr. Roosevelt had a good deal of the usual conviction of
the powerful man in public life that correction should be left to him, a little
resentment that a profession outside his own should be stealing his thunder.
This classification of muckraker, which I did not like, helped fix my
resolution to have done for good and all with the subject which had brought
it on me. But events were stronger than I. All the radical reforming element,
and I numbered many friends among them, were begging me to join their
movements. I soon found that most of them wanted attacks. They had little
interest in balanced findings. Now I was convinced that in the long run the
public they were trying to stir would weary of vituperation, that if you were
to secure permanent results the mind must be convinced.
One of the most heated movements at the moment was the effort to
persuade the public to refuse all gifts which came from fortunes into the

making of which it was known illegal and unfair practices had gone. “Do
not touch tainted money,” men thundered from pulpit and platform, among
them so able a man as Dr. Washington Gladden. The Rockefeller fortune
was singled out because about this time Mr. Rockefeller made some
unusually large contributions to colleges and churches and general
philanthropy. “It is done,” cried the critics, “in order to silence criticism.”
Frequently some one said to me, “You have opened the Rockefeller purse.”
But I knew, and said in print rather to the disgust of my friends in the
movement, that there was an unfairness to Mr. Rockefeller in this outcry. It
did not take public criticism to open his purse. From boyhood he had been a
steady giver in proportion to his income—10 per cent went to the Lord—
and through all the harrowing early years in which he was trying to
establish himself as a money-maker he never neglected to give the Lord the
established proportion. As his fortune grew his gifts grew larger. He not
only gave but saw the money given was wisely spent; and he trained his
children, particularly the son who was to administer his estate, to as wise
practice in public giving as we have ever had. That is, it did not take a
public outcry such as came in the early years of this century against the
methods of the Standard Oil Company to force Mr. Rockefeller to share his
wealth. He was already sharing it. Indeed, in the fifteen years before 1904
he had given to one or another cause some thirty-five million dollars.
If his gifts were larger at this time than they had ever been before, his
money-making was greater. If they were more spectacular than ever before,
it may have been because he thought it was time to call the public’s
attention to what they were getting out of the Standard Oil fortune. At all
events it seemed to me only fair that the point should be emphasized that it
had not taken a public revolt against his methods to force him to share his
profits.
I could not escape the controversies, hard as I tried. Nor could I escape
events, events which were forcing me against my will to continue my
observations and reports. My book was hardly published before it was
apparent that the oil field which it had covered and which for so long had
been supposed to be the only American oil field of importance was soon to
be surpassed by those in the Southwest. The first state to force recognition
of the change on the country at large was Kansas, where suddenly in the
spring of 1905 there broke out an agitation as unexpected to most observers
as it was interesting to those who knew their oil history. Kansas, we old-

timers told ourselves, was duplicating what the Oil Creek had done in 1872.
It was putting on a revolt. How had it come about?
For a number of years “wildcatters” with or without money had been
prospecting for oil in the state. Only a modest production had rewarded
them at first, but in 1904 oil suddenly poured forth in great quantities. On
the instant Kansas went oil-mad, practically every farmer in the state
dreamed of flowing wells. As soon as it was proved that Kansas was to be a
large field the Standard took charge. It leased, drilled, and, most important,
it threaded the state with its pipe-line system. No sooner was oil proved to
be on a farmer’s land than the pipe-line people were there caring for it at
market rates. But they began not only to develop and handle scientifically
and efficiently, but quite as scientifically and efficiently they began to get
rid of all the small fry that in the early days of small wells had been refining
and marketing. They would take all the oil that Kansas could produce, they
said, but on their own terms: they wanted no interference.
As soon as this became clear to Kansas the state rose in revolt. The
Populists, who for six years now must needs grumble in a corner, came out
to inveigh with all of their old fervor against the trust. Women’s clubs took
it up, political parties took it up. A program was developed, the gist of
which was that Kansas would take care of its own oil. Bills were introduced
into the legislature calculated to control railroad rates, pipe-line rates,
competitive marketing. To the joy of the Populists and to the horror of the
conservatives a bill for a state refinery was presented by the governor
himself. Kansas had a hemp factory in the state penitentiary not doing so
badly. Why should not the penitentiary run an oil refinery, too? The
legislature agreed to do it.
The excitement grew and so attracted the attention of the country that the
office concluded that I must go out and see what I could make of it. I did
not much want to go, not only because of my desire to free myself of the
subject but because my heart was too heavy with personal loss to feel
enthusiasm for any task. In the spring of 1905 my father had died after a
long slow illness. To me he had always been everything that is summed up
in the word “dear.” Modest, humorous, hard-working, friendly, faithful in
what he conceived to be the right, he loved his family and friends and
church, and asked only to serve them. His business associates held him as a
man of honor and a gentleman.

Father’s death for a time darkened my world. Later I began to realize that
the dearness of him was to remain as a permanent thing in my life. But in
1905 this sense of continued companionship was something which came
slowly out of a dark sea of loss. So it was with a heavy heart that I went to
see what was happening in Kansas.
First I wanted to see with my own eyes if the fields I had been hearing
about were as rich as advertised; so I spent some ten days driving about
southeastern Kansas and northeastern Oklahoma, then just coming in with
the promise of great wells. It was about as exciting a journey as I ever have
made. It was on one of these trips I saw my first dust storm. Driving in a
buckboard behind two spirited horses across a practically unbroken prairie,
my companion suddenly looked behind him. “Jehoshaphat!” he shouted.
“Wrap your head up.” I turned to see the sky from horizon to zenith filled
with dark rolling clouds. It was not from fire. What was it? “A dust storm,”
my companion cried.
Quickly and expertly he prepared to take it. He loosened the checkreins
of the horses, and the spirited animals evidently knowing what they were in
for dropped their heads as low as they could hold them and leaned up
against each other. We wrapped ourselves as closely as we could and, like
the horses, clung to each other. The storm did not last long, but it was pretty
awful while it did. The air was thick, you could not breathe. But it passed,
and I was ordered to shake myself out. I found that I was almost engulfed
with a fine black dust, that it was packed close to the hubs of the wheels of
our buckboard. It was ten days before I got rid of that dust, for it was ten
days before I had a real bath. The dust had turned the primitive water
supplies into a muddy liquid quite impossible to drink and hopeless for
cleansing.
The wonder of it was that the real discomforts counted not at all at the
time. I had joined an eager, determined, exultant procession of wildcatters
and promoters, of youths looking for their chance or seeking adventure for
the first time, tasting it to the full.
Nothing so great as this Kansas and Indian Territory field had ever been
known. Every well was to be a gusher, every settlement a city. On every
side they were selling town lots and stock in oil companies. One of the most
irresponsible stock-selling schemes I have ever known, I happened on in
one of these trips. Two anxious-faced boys were going about among

experienced oilmen begging them for oil leases, preferably oil leases on
which there was a proved well. The lads had come as sightseers and had
been caught in the wild excitement of the region. Everybody had a scheme
to make himself and his friends rich. Why not they? And largely as a joke
they had sent out a flamboyant letter offering stock in a mythical oil field.
The letter had gone to scores of innocents in the East, and in answer
schoolteachers, clergymen, and women with little or no money had poured
in subscriptions.
If there had been few subscriptions they would have been able to return
them, but here they were when I saw them with literally a suitcase full of
checks and money orders and not a foot of land leased, and in the
excitement there was practically no land to be had. They must either get a
lease or go to the penitentiary, they concluded. Hence their alarm, their
pitiful begging of older men to help them out of the predicament into which
their irresponsibility had plunged them.
It was not long before I found I was being taken for something more
serious than a mere journalist. Conservative Standard Oil sympathizers
regarded me as a spy and not infrequently denounced me as an enemy to
society. Independent oilmen and radical editors, who were in the majority,
called me a prophet. It brought fantastic situations where I was utterly unfit
to play the part. A woman of twenty-five, fresh, full of zest, only interested
in what was happening to her, would have reveled in the experience. But
here I was—fifty, fagged, wanting to be let alone while I collected
trustworthy information for my articles—dragged to the front as an apostle.
The funniest things were the welcomes. The funniest of all was at the
then new town of Tulsa, Oklahoma. I had arrived late at night in what
seemed to me a no man’s land, and after considerable trouble had found a
place in a rough little hostelry where I was so suspicious of the look of
things that I moved the bureau against the lockless door. I am sure now that
I was as safe there as I should have been in my bed at home.
I had registered, of course, and the next morning before I had finished my
breakfast I was waited on by the editor of the local newspaper, who took me
to his office, a barnlike structure next door, for an interview. Almost
immediately a handsome youth in knickerbockers and high laced boots
came hurriedly in.

“I think I ought to tell you, Miss Tarbell,” he said with a grin, “that you
are in for a serenade.”
“A serenade,” I said, “what do you mean?”
“Well,” he said, “the Tulsa boomers have been making a tour of cities to
the north. Their special train has just come in; they want something to
celebrate, and, learning that you were in town they are sending up the band
to welcome you. They want a speech.”
I had never made an impromptu speech in my life. I was horrified at the
idea. “You must get me out of this,” I begged of my gallant but very amused
informer.
“No,” he said, “there is no way to escape. Here they are.”
And there they were—a band of thirty or forty pieces, several of the
players stalwart Indians.
I had to face it, and for once in my life I had a happy idea. “Go buy me
two boxes of the best cigars that are to be had in town.” And I shoved a bill
into his hand. “Go quickly.”
And then the band began. Not so bad, but so funny. There I was standing
on the sidewalk with all the masculine inhabitants of Tulsa—so it seemed to
me—packed about, some of them serious and some of them highly
delighted at my obvious consternation. I had not guessed wrong about the
cigars. They preferred them to a speech, I saw as I passed around the circle
distributing them to the players. What was left I gave to the bodyguard
which had assembled to back me up. A compliment I have always treasured
was given by one of the Indians, as he watched me disposing of my goods:
“He all right.” Still more flattering it was as I went around in Tulsa that day
to meet gentlemen who had fat cigars tied with little red ribbons in their
buttonholes, and to have them point gaily to them as I passed.
But the serenade was not the end of the celebration. That afternoon I was
taken out in a barouche—the only one in the countryside, I was told—the
band behind, and paraded up and down the distracted streets of Tulsa. A day
or two later when I went on my journey, it was with a seatful of candy,
magazines, books, flowers, everything that the community afforded for a
going-away present. I never had been before nor have been since so much
the prima donna.

But all this was preliminary to the real task of finding out what was
happening in Kansas, outside of the production of oil. The legislation
already passed was intended to make the Standard Oil Company the servant
of the state. But I had long ago learned it was one thing to pass laws and
another thing to enforce and administer them. How were they getting on?
I went first to see the governor—E. W. Hoch—a humorless and honest
man. It was he who had sponsored the state refinery. I found him impressed
by what he had done, but a little doubtful about how things were going to
come out. He was opening his mail when I went in and he showed me
letters nominating him for the Presidency. He had been receiving many of
them, he said. It was obvious they came from radical socialists rejoicing
over the encouragement that he was giving to the public ownership of
industry. He liked the applause but did not like the source. He was no
socialist, he protested to me. He was a firm believer in the competitive
system. The state refinery was a “measuring stick.”
He had wanted to settle definitely just what the profits of the refinery
business in Kansas were. Nobody knew except experts, and they wouldn’t
tell. A first-class oil refinery would settle for all time the cost of refining
Kansas oil and force the sale at a reasonable price. He was not trying to
drive private industry out of the state. He merely wanted to force private
industry to be reasonable—the private industry being of course the Standard
Oil Company.
Governor Hoch and the state as a whole were soon feeling the effect of
the letdown which always follows an exciting legislative campaign,
particularly for the winner. Not since the early nineties had Kansas enjoyed
so rousing a time. And now it was over and they had to come down to
business. But could they get down to business? Could they administer the
new laws? Meetings were being held, half in jubilation over the successful
legislation, half in anxiety about the next step. I was asked to come and
speak at one of them.
I was no speaker, but I could not let them down. Moreover, because of
my familiarity with past exciting experiments on the part of indignant oil
independents I realized better than they did, so I thought, the hard pull they
had before them.
“Your problem now,” I told them, “is to do business. As far as laws can
insure it you have free opportunity; but good laws and free opportunity

alone do not build up a business. Unless you can be as efficient and as
patient, as farseeing as your great competitor—laws or no laws, you will
not succeed. You must make yourselves as good refiners, as good
transporters, as good marketers, as ingenious, as informed, as imaginative
in your legitimate undertakings as they are in both their legitimate and
illegitimate.”
My speech was not popular. What they wanted from me was a rousing
attack on the Standard Oil Company. They wanted a Mary Lease to tell
them to go on raising hell, and here I was telling them they had got all they
could by raising hell and now they must settle down to doing business.
“You have gone over to the Standard Oil Company?” said one disgusted
Populist.
I saw I had ruined my reputation as the Joan of Arc of the oil industry, as
some one had named me. But there were hard-headed independent
legislators and business men in the state who consoled me, “You are right,
we must learn to do business as well as they do.”
One immediate national effect of the Kansas disturbance was to arouse
the legislatures of other oil-producing states in the Southwest to enact laws
not unlike those of Kansas, though I do not remember that a state refinery
was sponsored anywhere else. There was a wide demand that Congress
place the pipe-line system under the Interstate Commerce Commission,
subject it to the same restrictions as interstate rails, but most important was
the fine popular backing the row gave the trust-busting campaign of
Theodore Roosevelt, now President of the United States. He had begun his
attack on big business by putting an end to the first great holding company
the country had seen—the Northern Securities Company. He had followed
this by a bill establishing a department for which people had been asking
for a decade or more, that of Commerce and Labor, including a Bureau of
Corporations with power to examine books and question personnel.
Congress at first shied at the measure, but Mr. Roosevelt thundered, “If you
do not pass it this session I will call an extra session.” And they knew he
would.
Ironically enough it was the Standard itself that broke the reluctance of
Congress. The proposal had shocked it out of its usual discretion. There
never was an organization in the country which held secrecy more essential
to doing business. Breaking down the walls behind which it operated was

not to be tolerated. It seems to have been the peppery John Archbold who
took charge of the fight against the bill, using all the political influence of
the company, which was considerable at that moment.
Roosevelt soon learned something of what was going on—it is not
certain how much; and when he saw his measure in danger he gave out the
statement that John D. Rockefeller had wired his friends in the Senate, “We
are opposed to any antitrust legislation—it must be stopped.”
The last thing in the world that John D. Rockefeller would have done was
to send such a telegram to anybody. Probably Mr. Roosevelt knew that; but
somebody in the Standard was passing on such a word, and Mr. Rockefeller
was the responsible head of the organization. His name did the work.
Congress passed the bill in a hurry. The Bureau of Corporations was
speedily set up, an excellent man at its head—James Garfield. The first task
assigned it by the President was an investigation of the petroleum industry.
This investigation reported in 1906 that the Standard Oil Company was
receiving preferential rates from various railroads and had been for some
time. One of the most spectacular business suits the country had seen up to
that time followed. The Standard was found guilty by Judge Kenesaw
Landis, the present arbitrator of the manners and morals of national
baseball, and a punishment long known as the “Big Fine”—twenty-nine
million dollars—inflicted. The country gasped at the size of the fine, but not
so the Bureau of Corporations. My correspondent there contended that over
eight thousand true indictments had been found, and that the maximum
penalty would have amounted to over a hundred and sixty million dollars!
But even the twenty-nine million dollars, so modest in the view of the
Bureau of Corporations, was not allowed to stand, for in 1908 Judge Peter
Grosscup of the Circuit Court of Appeals in Illinois upset it. Roosevelt was
angry. “There is too much power in the bench,” he told his friends.
But by this time the Government had under way another and a much
more serious line of attack, from which Roosevelt was hoping substantial
results. Back in 1890 the Congress had enacted what was known as the
Sherman Antitrust Law, a law making illegal every contract and
combination restraining trade and fostering monopoly. The Government
was now seeking to apply this law to the Standard Oil Company. Was it not
the first industry to attempt monopoly? Had it not been the model for all the
brood?

Such a suit was no new idea. Independent oilmen had long talked of it,
and in 1897 they had been ready to go ahead when at the last moment the
lawyer to whom they had entrusted their case was taken suddenly ill and
died. It must have seemed to the energetic Lewis Emery, Jr., who had been
engineering the attack that the Lord himself had “gone over to the
Standard.”
Ten years went by, and then in September, 1907, the United States of
America began suit against the Standard Oil Company of New York et al.
There were months and months of hearings. If I had been a modern
newspaper woman I could have made a good killing out of that long
investigation, for more than one editor asked me to analyze the testimony as
it came along or give my impressions of the gentlemen who appeared on the
witness stand. But I had no stomach for it; I never attended a public
examination though I of course read the published testimony with care.
I knew well enough that the time would come when, if I did my duty as a
historian, I must analyze the suit; but that must be after it was ended and a
sufficiently practical test had been made of the decision. It would be a long
time, I told myself, before I should be obliged to take up the story where I
had left it.

13
OFF WITH THE OLD—ON WITH THE NEW

Twelve years had gone by since I tied myself, temporarily as I thought, to
the McClure venture. To my surprise, the longer I was with the enterprise
the more strongly I felt it was giving me the freedom I wanted, as well as a
degree of that security which makes freedom so much easier a load to carry.
Here was a group of people I could work with, without sacrifice or
irritation. Here was a healthy growing undertaking which excited me, while
it seemed to offer endless opportunity to contribute to the better thinking of
the country. The future looked fair and permanent.
And then without warning the apparently solid creation was shattered and
I found myself sitting on its ruins.
Looking back now, I know that the split in the McClure staff in 1906 was
inevitable. Neither Mr. McClure nor Mr. Phillips, the two essential factors
in the creation, could have done other than he did. The points at issue were
fundamental. Each man acted according to an inner something which made
him what he was, something he could not violate.
Back of the difficulty lay the fact that at this time Mr. McClure was a sick
man. The hardships of his youth and early manhood, the intense pressure he
had put on himself in founding his enterprises had exhausted him. For
several years he had been obliged to take long vacations, usually in Europe
with his family, his staff carrying on his work in his absence. The
enterprises were bringing him larger and larger returns and more and more
honor; but that was not what he most wanted. He wanted to be in the thick
of things, feel himself an active factor in what was doing. Above all he
wanted to add to what he had already achieved, to build a bigger, a more
imposing House of McClure.

“What he wanted was more money,” I have heard men comment.
They were wrong. I have never known a man freer from the itch for
money as an end than S. S. McClure. Money for him meant power to do
things, to build, to help others. On his way up he had gathered about him a
horde of dependents with whom he was always ready to share his last
dollar. He was reckless with money as with ideas.
In these years when he was practically living in Europe, though returning
regularly to the United States, his chief interest was not in what his
enterprises were accomplishing, but in adding something bigger than they
were or could be. Only by doing this could he prove to himself and to his
colleagues that he was a stronger and more productive man than ever.
Nothing else would satisfy him.
His passion to build, to realize his ambitions, made him careless about
laying foundations. What he did usually had the character of improvisation,
frequently on a grand scale, sometimes merely gay spurts of fancy. I was
myself caught in one of the latter when Mr. McClure in London suddenly
ordered me in Paris to drop whatever I was doing and to hurry into
Germany to collect material for an animal magazine.
Animals were an abiding interest with McClure’s. Rudyard Kipling laid
the foundation in the Jungle tales. After that great series few were the
numbers that did not have an animal in text and picture. It was as much a
passion as baseball was to become in the latter days with The American
Magazine.
I spent a lively month visiting zoos, interviewing animal trainers and
hunters and keepers, buying books and photographs, turning in what I
considered a pretty good grist of materials and suggestions. What became of
it, I never knew, for I never heard a word of it after I came back to America.
The only remnant I have now of that month is a powder box of Dresden
china bought at the showrooms of the factory of the crossed swords, it
being my practice when on professional trips to use my leisure seeing the
town, guidebook in hand, and buying all the souvenirs my purse permitted.
It was in 1906 that Mr. McClure brought home from one of his foraging
expeditions the plan which was eventually to wreck his enterprises. He had
it cut and dried ready to put into action. Without consultation with his
partners he had organized a new company, the charter of which provided
not only for a McClure’s Universal Journal, but a McClure’s Bank, a

McClure’s Life Insurance Company, a McClure’s School Book Publishing
Company, and later a McClure’s Ideal Settlement in which people could
have cheap homes on their own terms. It undertook to combine with a
cheap magazine—which it goes without saying was to have an enormous
circulation with the enormous advertising which circulation brings—an
attempt to solve some of the great abuses of the day, abuses at which we
had been hammering in McClure’s Magazine. He proposed to do this by
giving them a competition which would draw their teeth.
By the time Mr. McClure got around to explaining his plan to me and
asking my cooperation he had worked himself up to regarding it as an
inspiration which must not be questioned. It seemed to me to possess him
like a religious vision which it was blasphemy to question. Obsessed as he
was, he was blind and deaf to the obstacles in the way. I am sure I hurt Mr.
McClure by telling him bluntly and at once that I would never have
anything to do with such a scheme.
In a recently published letter Lincoln Steffens tells how he saw Mr.
McClure’s plan. To him it was not only “fool” but “not quite right.”
Certainly it was not right. As organized, it was a speculative scheme as
alike as two peas to certain organizations the magazine had been battering.
The tragedy of the situation was that Mr. McClure did not see and could
not understand the arguments of his associates that his plan was not only
impossible but wrong. This failure of judgment was, I am convinced, due to
his long illness. The mental and physical exhaustion from which he was
suffering, and which he could not bring himself to understand or accept,
explains the unwisdom of this undertaking, his contention that it was an
inspiration, his stubbornness in insisting that it be accepted and set to work.
Human reason has little influence on one who believes he is inspired.
The members of the staff were little more than outsiders when it came to
the final decision. It was up to John Phillips to accept and do his utmost to
aid in the grandiose adventure or patiently to wait while persuading the
General that it was not the mission of the McClure crowd to reconstruct the
economic life of the country, that we were journalists, not financial
reformers. I think no man ever tried harder to keep another from a suicidal
undertaking; and certainly no man could have been firmer from the start in
his refusal to go along.

The struggle went on for six months, and no two men ever tried more
honestly to adjust their differences; but they were irreconcilable. It came to
a point where one or the other must sell his interest in the magazine. It was
Mr. McClure who bought out his partner.
Although McClure’s Magazine is no longer on the newsstands, it does
occupy a permanent place in the history of the period that it served, because
it worked itself into the literary and economic life of the country.
It was a magazine which from the first put quality above everything else
and was willing to chase checks around town in order to pay for it. For
those who collect Kipling there are the first publications of many of his
rarest poems, short stories, and such distinguished serials as “Captains
Courageous” and “Kim.” Here first appeared Willa Cather and O. Henry.
It was a magazine which backed regardless of expense, one might say,
the investigations and reports of men like Ray Stannard Baker and Lincoln
Steffens. For twelve years it encouraged with liberality and patience the
work of which I have been talking in this narrative.
Mr. McClure had two editorial policies when it came to getting the thing
he felt was important for the Magazine. First, the writer must be well paid
and the expense money be generous. Second, and most important of all, he
must be given time. He did not ask that you produce a great serial in six
months. He gave you years if it was necessary. I spent the greater part of
five years on “The History of the Standard Oil Company.” I was what was
called a contributing editor; that is, I turned in suggestions as they came to
me in my work around the country. I did occasional extra articles that
seemed to be in my line. I read and took part in editorial counsels, but it
was recognized that all the time I demanded should be given to the serial. I
know of no other editor and no other publisher who has so fully recognized
the necessity of generous pay and ample time, if he were to get from a staff
work done according to the best editorial standard, and worthy of the
magazine and the writer.
When it was finally decided that Mr. Phillips was to sever his long
relation to McClure’s several members of the editorial staff resigned,
including Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, John Siddall, the efficient
young managing editor Albert Boyden, and myself. We could not see the
magazine without Mr. Phillips.

The last day we left the office, then on Twenty-third Street near Fourth
Avenue, some of us went together to Madison Square and sat on a bench
talking over our future. We were derelicts without a job.
But not for long.

First year of The American
Magazine, 1907

There was then in New York, though it was not generally known, a
magazine group which wanted a change. The magazine was very old—long
known as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Monthly, recently changed to The
American Magazine. Its owner was Frederick L. Colver; its editor, Ellery
Sedgwick (afterward editor of the Atlantic); its publisher, William Morrow
(afterward the founder of William Morrow & Company, the book
publishing house). Mr. Colver approached Mr. Phillips: “Why don’t you
take it over?”
Finally in council assembled, our editorial group together with David A.
McKinlay and John Trainor of the McClure business department, decided to
incorporate the Phillips Publishing Company and buy The American
Magazine. With what we could put in ourselves and money from the sale of
stock to interested friends, we secured funds for the purchase and sufficient
working capital.
We left McClure’s in March: six months later, October, 1906, appeared
our first issue. The announcement shows how seriously we took ourselves,